page_title: Nuclear power
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Nuclear power / History / Early years
caption_attribution_description: Calder Hall, United Kingdom - The world's first commercial nuclear power station. First connected to the national power grid on 27 August 1956 and officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 17 October 1956
context_page_description: Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions that release nuclear energy to generate heat, which most frequently is then used in steam turbines to produce electricity in a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Generating electricity from fusion power remains at the focus of international research.
  Civilian nuclear power supplied 2,563 terawatt hours of electricity in 2018, equivalent to about 10% of global electricity generation, and was the second largest low-carbon power source after hydroelectricity. As of December 2019, there are 443 civilian fission reactors in the world, with a combined electrical capacity of 395 gigawatt. There are also 56 nuclear power reactors under construction and 109 reactors planned, with a combined capacity of 60 GW and 120 GW, respectively.
context_section_description: The first organization to develop nuclear power was the U.S. Navy, with the S1W reactor for the purpose of propelling submarines and aircraft carriers. The first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus, was put to sea in January 1954. The trajectory of civil reactor design was heavily influenced by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who with Weinberg as a close advisor, selected the PWR/Pressurized Water Reactor design, in the form of a  10 MW reactor for the Nautilus, a decision that would result in the PWR receiving a government commitment to develop, an engineering lead that would result in a lasting impact on the civilian electricity market in the years to come. The United States Navy Nuclear Propulsion design and operation community, under Rickover's style of attentive management retains a continuing record of zero reactor accidents (defined as the uncontrolled release of fission products to the environment resulting from damage to a reactor core). with the U.S. Navy fleet of nuclear-powered ships, standing at some 80 vessels as of 2018.
  On June 27, 1954, the USSR's Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, based on what would become the prototype of the RBMK reactor design, became the world's first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid, producing around 5 megawatts of electric power.
  On July 17, 1955 the BORAX III reactor, the prototype to later Boiling Water Reactors, became the first to generate electricity for an entire community, the town of Arco, Idaho. A motion picture record of the demonstration, of supplying some 2 megawatts (2 MW) of electricity, was presented to the United Nations, Where at the "First Geneva Conference",  the world's largest gathering of scientists and engineers, met to explore the technology in that year. In 1957 EURATOM was launched alongside the European Economic Community (the latter is now the European Union). The same year also saw the launch of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
  The world's first "commercial nuclear power station", Calder Hall at Windscale, England, was opened in 1956 with an initial capacity of 50 MW per reactor (200 MW total), it was the first of a fleet of dual-purpose MAGNOX reactors, though officially code-named PIPPA (Pressurized Pile Producing Power and Plutonium) by the UKAEA to denote the plant's dual commercial and military role.
  The U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program formally commenced in 1954. Under its management, the 2 megawatt SM-1, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, was the first in the United States to supply electricity in an industrial capacity to the commercial grid (VEPCO), in April 1957.
  The first commercial nuclear station to become operational in the United States was the 60 MW Shippingport Reactor (Pennsylvania), in December 1957.
  The 3 MW SL-1 was a U.S. Army experimental nuclear power reactor at the National Reactor Testing Station, Idaho National Laboratory. It was derived from the Borax Boiling water reactor (BWR) design and it first achieved operational criticality and connection to the grid in 1958. 
  For reasons unknown, in 1961 a technician removed a control rod about 22 inches farther than the prescribed 4 inches. This resulted in a steam explosion which killed the three crew members and caused a meltdown. The event was eventually rated at 4 on the seven-level INES scale.
  In service from 1963 and operated as the experimental testbed for the later Alfa-class submarine fleet, one of the two liquid-metal-cooled reactors on board the Soviet submarine K-27, underwent a fuel element failure accident in 1968, with the emission of gaseous fission products into the surrounding air, producing 9 crew fatalities and 83 injuries.
caption: The Calder Hall nuclear power station in the United Kingdom was the world's first commercial nuclear power station. It was connected to the national power grid on 27 August 1956 and officially revealed in a ceremony by Queen Elizabeth II on 17 October 1956. In common with a number of other Generation I nuclear reactors, the plant had the dual purpose of producing electrical power and plutonium-239, the latter for the nascent nuclear weapons program in Britain.[39]
exif: {}