Editor’s note: Here’s an intereting story from a newspapaer with a most intereting name for we East Coast folk. Expect to see more of their stories here in the future.
By Kevin Killough, Cowboy State Daily
A small modular reactor demonstration project in Kemmerer has people in Wyoming excited for a nuclear future, but the Cowboy State has a little-known nuclear past.
Wyoming was home to the first portable land-based nuclear power plant in the United States from 1962-1968, which was transported by air and built near Sundance. It provided 1.25 megawatts of power for three large radar domes at the now-defunct Sundance Air Force Station, which helped keep America safe from Communism.
“It was during the Cold War, so they watched for missiles,” Rocky Courchaine, director of the Crook County Museum, told Cowboy State Daily.
The museum maintains an exhibit on the historic site of the first experimental nuclear reactor in the U.S.
If you liked this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics. It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Don’t take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.
The reactor, known as PM-1, was part of the Army Nuclear Power Program. The idea was to have small reactors that could be deployed at remote sites that needed heat and electricity.
The program developed a number of different small reactor designs, which were deployed at various remote locations, including Antarctica and Alaska.
The location of the Wyoming reactor is remote today, but in 1962 when the reactor went online, it was largely wilderness.
And in the early 1960s, “portable” wasn’t exactly a briefcase or backpack.
The reactor was assembled from 16 packages the size of shipping containers. They weighed about 30,000 pounds each.
These containers were flown in by C-130 aircraft to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. From there, they were trucked to the Sundance Air Force Station about 10 miles north of Sundance on Warren Peak.
The station was part of the Air Defense Command and fed radar data to the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.
It was the era of the Cold War, and America was watching the Soviets closely.
The radar installation on Warren Peak provided data that could be analyzed to determine if missiles were heading for America, or if detected planes were friendly or commies.
