Truth is, it actually happened three years earlier and three thousand miles southeast, in Oak Ridge.
ORNL's Graphite Reactor had been built in 1943 amid the urgency of World War II's Manhattan Project. The reactor's original mission was to yield a few hundred grams of plutonium for the physicists and chemists designing the atomic bomb. Charged with creating an informative visitors' display, one crew yoked the massive reactor to a toy steam generator, the kind sold to budding young scientists through the Sears, Roebuck catalog, right alongside crystal-radio kits. In 1957, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station began cranking out nuclear kilowatts for Philadelphia households. And in 1959, the Savannah, a sleek cargo vessel luxury liner, took to the high seas under a head of nuclear steam.