On December 20, 1951, the world’s first electricity generating nuclear reactor came online. Dubbed EBR-I, this small-scale reactor was constructed by the federal government as part of a pioneering nuclear program at the Idaho National Laboratory. While the EBR-I was the first reactor to successfully generate electricity, powering at first a number of lightbulbs and eventually the entire building in which it was housed, it was intended to prove a concept much more exciting than just nuclear power.
EBR stands for Experiment Breeder Reactor, a type of reactor with a science-fiction like promise. It is something we accept as a rule of the universe that when something uses fuel, be it gasoline, twigs, or paper, the act of creating heat results in the absence of the fuel. To have fire, you must burn wood, and when you burn wood, you have no more wood left EBR-I proved that this does not always have to be the case. Essentially, a breeder reactor is able to cause the necessary chain reaction of uranium atoms while creating a byproduct of plutonium, another viable nuclear fuel. If the reaction is finely tuned, the reactor can produce heat (and electricity from it) while creating more nuclear fuel than it consumes.
When we view it in this guise, it is easy to see why the government was so interested in proving the concept of the breeder reactor. It is a promise that seems to defy some of the most basic notions of the universe, that you can harvest energy from a fuel and end up with more fuel. And while it is promising, it is not perfect, or entirely necessary. The efficiency rates of a uranium reaction, coupled with the recently discovered abundance of uranium fuel, has made the breeder reactor almost unnecessary for the time being. And as new generations of more efficient and safer reactors are developed, less fuel is required to generate power, and new reactors are being designed that will run entirely on the byproduct of these reactors, essentially closing the nuclear fuel cycle and allowing us to generate electricity with no byproducts. While solar and wind power are the most ideologically compelling sources of renewable energy, they have nowhere near as much promise or viability to meet our ever increasing energy demands as nuclear power.