Katherine Sullivan

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech at the United Nations titled Atoms for Peace.

The U.S.

not only encouraged friendly countries to build nuclear power plants, but also helped share knowledge, and in some cases, nuclear fuel with them.

And the Eisenhower administration was also undertaking a rebranding campaign at home.

It was even popularized in an educational film made by Disney.

That phrase, too cheap to meter, it helped drive enthusiasm for the technology.

It was first said by a government official named Louis Strauss.

If you saw the movie Oppenheimer, you might be familiar with Strauss.

He was played by Robert Downey Jr.

Strauss was imagining a future where nuclear power was so abundant that it would be basically free, too cheap to be tracked by your electric meter.

And in 1957, the first commercial nuclear power plant roared to life in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.

After that, an era of nuclear energy expansion unfolded.

At the same time that fission reactors were popping up across the U.S., the government was working on a new kind of nuclear science, nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion is different from nuclear fission.

Fusion requires heating atoms up to extremely high temperatures until they fuse together, releasing huge amounts of energy.

It's the same process that powers the sun.

Many consider it the holy grail of energy that would generate nearly limitless amounts of power.

It added to the excitement for nuclear science, even though we still haven't made it work.

Meanwhile, back in the 1960s, the government was making big predictions for fission.

At peak, there were about 112 reactors operating in the U.S.