Sacralizing Nuclear Pt. II
My appearance on Robert Bryce's podcast and the blessing of Dresden
Robert Bryce recently had me on his show to talk about the reconstruction of Notre Dame and Industrial Cathedrals.
We talked about much more than that, of course—the progressive idea of history and its trade-offs, the grid as an industrial commons, the obstacles facing nuclear power, cultivating an enriching relationship to the past, etc. Click the link above to check it out!
After talking with Robert, I thumbed through a history of Commonwealth Edison to learn more about the construction of the Dresden nuclear power plant and stumbled upon another instance of nuclear sacralization.
Commonwealth Edison broke ground on Dresden in Illinois after Admiral Hyman Rickover completed America’s first nuclear power plant, Shippingport, in 1957. Most other utilities were hesitant to commission nuclear power plants in the late 1950s because Rickover had been such an asshole while building Shippingport, they couldn’t stomach the idea that he had achieved something amazing.
But far-seeing utilities like ComEd took a different view. They wanted to be pioneers of this new technological frontier. In 1957, the company started work on the first privately financed nuclear power plant in American history.
At the groundbreaking ceremony for the unit’s construction in the summer of ’57, a Catholic Bishop led an invocation, calling upon God to “help us realize that the knowledge of atomic energy is one more gift from Thy Fatherly love…Help us to more fully appreciate Thy wisdom which designed the atomic structure of the universe.”
When the plant came online three years later, ComEd held a dedication ceremony on Columbus Day, celebrating the New Atomic Age along with the discovery of the New World—joining together past, present, and future.
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Crom’s Blessing
This brings back memories, since I worked at Com Ed from about 1972 - 1978. I was a young engineer and taught classes on nuclear power to workers planning on taking the test to work as plant operators. As you might guess, this was much different than being a substation tech and I had to flunk about half of them. By the time I left, there was talk of shutting down Dresden as too small and inefficient. Newer plants came along with PWR designs deemed “safer” than Dresden BWR.