INL Media Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 21, 2015
NEWS MEDIA CONTACTS:
Donald Miley, 208-821-4298, donald.miley@inl.gov
Laura Scheele, 219-381-8672, laura.scheele@inl.gov
Experimental Breeder Reactor-I opens with new social media focus
IDAHO FALLS – Beginning this weekend, you can take a closer look at INL’s historic nuclear contributions at the Experimental Breeder Reactor-I museum and on its social media accounts. Information and images related to tours at the historic museum may be found on the EBR-I Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Public tours of the EBR-I will resume for the summer starting Friday, May 22. The facility, on the Department of Energy’s Idaho Site off U.S. Highway 20, will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week through the Labor Day weekend. Visitors can either tour the facility on their own or take a guided tour. Throughout the summer season, visitors may share Instagram images of their tour groups or make a post on the dedicated Facebook page.
EBR-I was completed in 1951 and produced the world’s first usable amount of electricity from nuclear power on Dec. 20, 1951. The reactor was operated until late 1963 and decommissioned in 1964. EBR-I was dedicated as a Registered National Historic Landmark on Aug. 25, 1966, by President Lyndon Johnson and Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
EBR-I was also dedicated as a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1979 by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a Historic Landmark for Advances in Materials Technology in 1979 by the American Society of Metals, and a Nuclear Historic Landmark by the American Nuclear Society in 1987. In June 2004, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) marked EBR-I as an IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing.
More than a quarter of a million visitors from every state and dozens of foreign countries have come through its doors since EBR-I opened for summer tours in 1975. Learn more at http://www.inl.gov/ebr/ or watch the video to take a virtual tour of the historic nuclear reactor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPxAxBul1BI.
