Anniversary at Obninsk: The First Commercial Nuclear Power Plant

June 24, 2015, 5:11PMANS Nuclear CafeWill Davis

The development of any competitive technology has always been marked by a headlong rush by competitors in the field to achieve before others. The dash to develop workable nuclear power plants (no matter what their energy was employed to do) certainly saw this phenomenon from the late 1940s onward. In June we celebrate the anniversary of the first commercial power plant to be placed on the grid anywhere. It was not in the United States. It was in the Soviet Union.