Harper’s Magazine Reports on the Risky Resurgence of Nuclear Power
“Dwight Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ program, unveiled in 1953, set the optimistic tone for nuclear power: ‘The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. The capability, already proved, is here today,’ and would ‘rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient, and economic usage.’ Four years later, Moorpark, a small town northwest of Los Angeles, became the first American community to draw its electricity from a nuclear reactor. Moorpark’s power came from the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory twenty miles away.”