Nuclear energy for the American home: from the archive, 20 July 1955

The atom can indeed be stripped of its military casing and adapted to the arts of peace, says the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission

Ten years after the explosion of the first atomic bomb, when a group of nuclear scientists saw the first mushroom cloud and confessed that they "knew sin," a switch was thrown in up-state New York yesterday, and for the first time in this country generated atomic power for such innocent uses as lighting lamps, turning fans and cooking hamburgers.

Mr Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called it "a moving demonstration that the atom can indeed be stripped of its military casing and adapted to the arts of peace." This was a precise description of what was happening yesterday at West Milton, New York, because the power was flowing from a reactor built and used to test a model of the power plant that was installed two years ago in the atomic submarine. This idle reactor belongs to the Government, through the Atomic Energy Commission, which is now leasing 10,000 atomic kilowatts to an up-state power company, the Niagara-Mohawk Power Company, at a rate of 2 d per 10 Kilowatt-hours of energy.