The Fire

We Walked Away From

On July 17, 1955, the people of Arco, Idaho went to bed not knowing what had just happened to their town. About 1,200 of them, most of them ranchers and their families, in a little city in the Snake River desert. Before the experiment, everyone involved was sworn to secrecy.

For a little over an hour, the Utah Power and Light Company was disconnected. The power feeding Arco came instead from the BORAX-III reactor at the National Reactor Testing Station, twenty miles out in the sagebrush flats. When they threw the switch, Arco became the first city in the world powered entirely by nuclear electricity.

An hour. Then the utility company came back online. The press release went out a month later. Delegates from seventy-two nations were at the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva when they heard about it.

That was the future landing in a field in Idaho. And we watched it happen, cheered briefly, and then slowly, methodically, over the next four decades, walked away from it.

That is the single greatest energy failure in human history.