A week late, but 6 days and 66 years ago, Dresden Generating Station Unit 1 went critical for the first time. Dresden 1 was the first privately financed nuclear power station in the United States (note all the qualifiers here)

So when we say the first nuclear power plant, what do we mean? 🧵

In an effort to distract from, well, everything, I spent the afternoon combining two hobbies. I've been looking for a good way to hang this sign since I picked it up last year. So I finally got around to prototyping and printing some brackets. My calipers had a dead battery, so there were changes 😅

In continuing tales of nuclear, something for @nuclearanna.bsky.social . Fuel pellet cards were a common promotional item for plants. This one is from the ANS, paired with probably the fanciest example I've ever seen (from Trojan). This continues today (the local utility gives them away at Pride)

Happy birthday to Oyster and Morel, the two giant gremlins who inhabit my house

For today's relics of nuclear past, coffee mugs! A fascinating sub genre of what people considered worth commemorating in the civilian fleet, we have the usual start of commercial operations or criticality, but also long outages, steam generator replacements, or extended power uprates. Always fun.

A new (to me) artifact of old nuclear. George Senn retired from GE in 1984 after heading their nuclear operations division. It's interesting to see what GE thought was worth commemorating back then, particularly since this was not easy or inexpensive to produce

Taking some time to get away into the desert.