Whipped Cream Difficulties

Science Sunday!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a sucker for nukes. Not just nuclear weapons, but civilian use of nuclear energy, the whole Project Plowshare/early reactors type of thing.

“Pioneering with Power”, a promo film for the Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts.

According to several sources Yankee Rowe was the first commercial PWR operating in the United States. This view discards the government-sponsored Shippingport Atomic Power Station, which was not built on a commercial basis and relied on several technologies that would not be embraced by the commercial operators. The Dresden Generating Station, a commercial boiling water reactor (BWR), slightly preceded the opening of Yankee Rowe in 1960. US government sources place the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction at Dresden-1 on 15 October 1959 and the first one at Yankee Row on 19 August 1960.[6] (These dates probably preceded the entering into commercial operation of either plant by several months.)

It operated until 1992.

Bonus: by way of “Cruise Ships Info” (really?), a tour of the NS Savannah. NS Savannah was the first nuclear powered merchant ship (hence the “NS”, for “Nuclear Ship”).

I have personal reasons for wanting to link to this, but the narration is horrible text-to-speech. You’d do better muting it and turning on captions.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2020 at 2:07 pm and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.