Positive Reaction for the Ages: Goochland Man Helped Start Up the First Nuclear Power Plant 50 Years Ago

By Greg Edwards, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.

Dec. 2–CROZIER — Fifty years ago today, F.J. “Jeff” Keith, then 27, was helping make history, though that thought never occurred to him at the time.

Keith, a mechanical engineer, watched the dials and wrote down readings as the nation’s first, full-scale commercial nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Pa., was fired up for the first time.

The legendary Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the primary advocate for a nuclear-powered Navy, attended the event, as did executives of Westinghouse Corp., which designed the plant, and Duquesne Light Co., which co-owned the plant with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

The mood in the plant’s operations room was low-key as the control rods were withdrawn from the reactor and it went “critical,” sustaining a chain reaction for the first time.

“I don’t remember any cheering,” Keith recalled recently at his office in Goochland County.

The only recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening, other than the dignitaries, was that someone passed around a sheet of graph paper, mapping the chain reaction, and everyone signed it. Keith’s name is there, in the second column, a little more than halfway down.

The Shippingport plant was turned on 15 years to the day after Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the abandoned stands of a University of Chicago football field.

About three years before the successful Shippingport startup, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed his Atoms for Peace program to develop peaceful nuclear technologies.

David Christian, chief nuclear officer for Dominion Resources Inc., parent of Dominion Virginia Power, said that Adm. Rickover had much to do with the transfer of nuclear power to the utility industry. It was Rickover’s involvement that was responsible for the discipline and high standards that characterize the nuclear power industry today, he said.

Keith, a native of Clarksburg, W.Va., graduated from West Virginia University with a mechanical engineering degree in 1951. He became interested in engineering because of his older brother, Earl, who attended engineering school on the G.I. Bill.

His first job was as a civilian employee for the Navy at Portsmouth, where he caught the glimpse of the first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus, through the periscope of another submarine. In 1955, he went to work for Westinghouse, where he spent much of his time helping design the power plant for the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Enterprise.

That’s what he was doing when he was loaned to the Shippingport project.

“The power company didn’t have enough qualified people to conduct tests,” Keith said.

He believes that it was by coincidence that he was picked for the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift 50 years ago when it was decided the plant’s first chain reaction would be initiated.

The control rods were pulled out of the reactor in steps as he and other engineers kept watch over the instruments. At 4:30 a.m., heat from the reaction was recorded.

More tests followed, and two weeks later, the plant began producing electricity and feeding it onto the Pittsburgh power grid. In May 1958, Eisenhower presided at a ceremonial opening of the plant.

The Shippingport plant, located on the Ohio River, produced power until 1982 when it was shut down and the site cleaned up. Duquesne Light currently operates its Beaver Valley nuclear plant near the site.

In the years since Shippingport launched the age of nuclear power for consumer use, nuclear energy has become a major contributor to the nation’s energy supply.

A fifth of all electricity produced in the United States now comes from nuclear power.

But in Virginia, nuclear power makes up 38.1 percent of power generated in the state, or 3,432 megawatts. One megawatt of generation capacity is enough to supply 250 Virginia homes.

One of the two reactors at Dominion’s North Anna Power Station produces roughly 900 megawatts of power.

By comparison, the Shippingport reactor produced 60 megawatts of electricity and was small by today’s standards.

The reactor worked by heating water, which then flowed to a heat exchanger to turn a second water supply into steam. The steam then turned a turbine to generate electricity.

Keith was involved in designing the fluid systems that conveyed water into and out of the reactor, a job that required him on occasion to go into the reactor after it was shut down to conduct tests.

In 1959, Westinghouse sent him to Newport News to help with the testing of the power plants on the Enterprise.

Today, he operates a consulting business with his son and grandson out of a converted gas station on River Road in Crozier. Contact Greg Edwards at (804) 649-6390 or gedwards@timesdispatch.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.

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