...essentially an aircraft carrier naval reactor, the reactor at Shippenport. Ground was broken (in a ceremony where President Eisenhower handled the shovel) in September 1954 and reached full power in December 1957. It shut down in 1982, as it was not at the scale of later reactors, a subject of some irony considering recent thinking. It is as of this time, the only commercial breeder reactor ever to have operated in the United States as it is the only thermal commercial reactor to have a fuel elements incorporating thorium.
The Wikipedia page for Shippenport has accurate information.
I have long advocated the incorporation of thorium in heavy water reactors to enable them to breed plutonium and neptunium from "once through" uranium recovered from used nuclear fuel. The destruction of long friendly relations with our neighbor to the North by the orange buffoon has added an additional barrier to this idea.
We were, before the disastrous effort of the orange buffoon - ventriloquist's dummy for his Maggotcy King Eloon - to destroy American science, well into an age of nuclear creativity not seen in this country since the 1960's. The former director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the late great Alvin Weinberg wrote a book on the topic of nuclear creativity in the 1950s and 1960s, "The First Nuclear Era."
He would have been thrilled to see the late 2010s and early 2020s, given the enormous creativity observed with advances in materials science and computational power. It represented a third nuclear era. It is probably the case that the modern aircraft carrier powerplants could function as commercial plants but they are still limited by being machines for producing mere electricity. In an era of extreme global heating, we definitely need to do more than that with nuclear heat. There are many outstanding designs with broader applicability nearing commercial use.
As for the destruction of Michigan forest for solar junk which will have an an average continous power load of a large high school's diesel generator, given the poor capacity utilization of solar, and as it will require fossil fueled backup every night and every time it snows heavily in Michigan, well yes, it's disgusting. Regrettably this sort of awful enterprise remains popular, stupid, but popular.
Thanks for your comment.
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