Experimental Breeder Reactor 1

Just down the road from Craters of the Moon was this little gem.  It is a building on the outskirts of the land that is sectioned off for Idaho National Laboratory (which is HUGE.)  EBR-1 was the first nuclear reactor in the world to generate electricity, way back in 1951.  It was decommissioned in 1964 and declared a national historic monument.  In 1976 it was turned into a museum and you can take a self guided tour of the place for free.  C insists that the whole building was creepy, which it was, but I think it bothered her a little more than it did me.

I mean, what could possibly be creepy about this?

Just inside that door is a nice sign about how low the residual levels of radiation are and that as long as you wear shoes, you’ll be fine!  So we continued on our self guided tour.

Standing in the control room (the lights were really bright):

The story behind the shutdown button was pretty funny.  Yes, I had to pretend to punch it:

Standing on top of the reactor core:

One of the steam turbines connected to a generator:

Unfortunately, the lighting in most of the exhibit wasn’t very good and many of our pictures didn’t turn out very well.  But we were able to capture most of the highlights.

Outside they even had a couple of prototypes for nuclear powered aircraft:

The actual engines are only about 10 ft long.  The giant frames were in place to keep them from taking off across the desert and for monitoring.  Thankfully, they wised up before getting these past the prototype phase and you can thank JFK for shutting the whole project down.  Planes that spew massive amounts of radiation everywhere they go couldn’t have been a good thing…