Despite Fukushima, global nuclear power on the rise

One outgrowth of the U.S. super-secret WW2 Manhattan Project, which produced the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, six years later, in 1951, a small experimental reactor in the United States produced the world’s first electricity generated by nuclear power. The first fully commercial nuclear power plant was constructed in the U.S. Dresden Unit 1 in Illinois had a capacity of 250 megawatts and came online in 1960 and operated until 1978. In 1962 Canada became the second country to generate electricity from nuclear power. Canada’s first nuclear power plant, called NPD for Nuclear Power Demonstration, generated as modest 20 megawatts. As of October 2012, about 15.2 percent of Canada’s electricity is now produced by nuclear power.

Sixty-two years after America’s first civilian reactor proved the feasibility of generating electricity from nuclear power, the U.S. government’s Energy Information Agency reports that 31 countries now have nuclear power programs, generating more than 370 gigawatts worldwide. The report notes, “From the early 1970s to the early 1990s, nuclear power steadily grew around the world, with brief periods of relatively slow growth following the accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986), as the nuclear industry absorbed the lessons learned from both incidents.”