Bonus: "Turn on the atoms"

From the achives: How Mr. Atom was going to run everything, including my toothbrush.

After I wrote Things to look forward to in our electric future, a reader noted on LinkedIn: “I remember Lloyd, nuclear was going to power everything.” I remembered that America’s Independent Light and Power Companies, who did all the ads in the previous post, also did a pile of them promoting atomic power. I collected a few of them when I did the previous post a few years ago but didn’t use them at the time, and they are pretty wild.

My favourite claims that someday, “turn on the atoms” will be a sensible way of saying, “turn on the light.” It’s not unreasonable, given that here in Ontario, many people call electricity “hydro” because our source was mostly hydroelectric. Given that it’s now mostly nuclear, I should probably pay the atoms bill rather than the hydro bill.

Then there is Joyce Myron, who won the “$64,000 Question” for answering questions about nuclear power and got to hang out with a bunch of guys in identical shirts and ties. This is before the 1958 scandal that erupted when it was found out that contestants were given the answers in advance, so we have no idea about whether Joyce was tipped off. The scandal was dramatized in the movie Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford.

Some of these ads appear to have been made before the designs of reactors were completely figured out. One of the reasons that Canadian nuclear reactors differ from American designs is that Canada didn’t have the steel technology to make the sphere, or calandria vessel, that enclosed the reactor core, so the CANDU reactor had tubes instead.

Here, the men of atomic-electric power study a model of a reactor sitting inside a containment dome.

Those domes are a good thing, strong enough to contain a meltdown. Things might have been different in Chornobyl if they had one.

They were going to be everywhere, even in the middle of farmland. “shapes like these on the horizon may well be trademarks of the atomic age.”

The power of the atom lit up San Francisco from a “strange-looking pilot plant in the hills.” According to Wikipedia, “The discovery of an active fault running beneath the facility led to the closure of its most productive reactors in 1977.”

Here is the full Mr. Atom ad. He may not be running my razor (I don’t use an electric razor), but I do have an atom-powered electric toothbrush.

It’s the future!