Seeds Of Chernobyl: How The First Nuclear Power Plant Was Born

The Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) photographed in 1957

Inside this nondescript building 100 kilometers from Moscow, electricity generated by nuclear fission was channeled onto a power grid for the first time on June 27, 1954.

A file photo of the casing of the so-called Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever tested

The Soviet Union under dictator Josef Stalin had poured its scientific resources into playing catch-up in the development of apocalyptic weaponry. But after the first Soviet nuclear bomb was tested in August 1949, several of the U.S.S.R.’s top physicists were redirected to harness the monstrous power of nuclear fission for energy production at the same time as the West was pursuing the same goal. The research was dubbed "atoms for peace" by the United States and "the peaceful atom" by Moscow.

An early photo of the Peaceful Atom reactor inside the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant

The Soviet Union had pushed to harness nuclear fission for energy production in part because of the awkward distribution of the fossil fuels that were powering much of its industry. 

Train wagons loaded with coal in Yakutsk in the Far East of Soviet Russia

Most of the Soviet Union’s wealth of hydrocarbons lay beneath inhospitable regions of Siberia, while its population was largely clustered in the country’s western regions. At one point, around 40 percent of all Soviet rail freight was taken up with transporting coal to its power plants.

The control panel of the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant photographed in 1955

The Obninsk facility used heat from the nuclear fission of enriched uranium to boil water into steam, which in turn spun an electricity-producing turbine. The power of the nuclear reactor had to be limited to the output an existing turbine could handle.

Scientists measure radiation levels inside the Obninsk NPP in 1957. 

A witness to the experimental reactor being activated in 1954 described watching “a jet of vapor escaping from the valve with a loud hiss. The white cloud of ordinary steam, which was not yet hot enough to rotate the turbine, seemed to us a miracle. After all, this was the first steam produced by atomic energy."

An unidentified section of the Obninsk NPP photographed in the 1970s

The power plant remained in operation without major incident until it was decommissioned in 2002. The success of the small-scale facility was the basis for the design of the RMBK reactors that would lie at the heart of several Soviet NPPs, including a facility near Kyiv in Soviet Ukraine known as the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.