Moorpark Marks Anniversary of Hour of Nuclear Power : History: On Nov. 12, 1957, a switch was flipped, making the city the first in the nation to use atomic energy.

At exactly 7:30 p.m., the lights went out. When they flashed back on 20 seconds later, the tiny farming community of Moorpark had entered the Atomic Age. And the history books.

On this cool winter evening 36 years ago, the town of 1,100 became the first in the country to be lighted entirely with nuclear powered electricity.

The date was Nov. 12, 1957. And the entire town remained on atomic power for an hour.

“Everybody was pretty excited about it,” recalled Barton Miller, Moorpark’s postmaster at the time. “My wife and I drove up on a hill that night so we could see the town all lighted up. We didn’t know what to expect, really.”

Two weeks later, more than 20 million viewers would tune in to watch the event as recorded on Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” television program.

Murrow had sent a reporter and a three-man camera crew from New York to capture the moment when all of Moorpark was illuminated by atomic energy.

The town continued to receive some, but not all of its electricity from atomic energy for the next two to three years. Then the nuclear power industry lost interest and turned to larger projects.

But that first hour was what counted most to Moorpark residents and nuclear energy officials.

The CBS broadcast featured footage of several lighted houses along Walnut Street and Moorpark, McFadden and Cornett avenues--now the center of a city with a population of 30,000.

“We were more impressed with being on national television, than about the event itself,” said Charles Sullenbarger, whose family’s house on McFadden Avenue was one of those shown on television. “I don’t think people really understood what was happening.”

Among the slightly befuddled residents was former Moorpark grocery store owner Ruben Castro.

“To me it was a mystery because I didn’t know anything about atomic power, other than it was used for a bomb,” he said. “I guess I should have been happy that we were using this warlike energy for peacetime purposes. But it didn’t dawn on me. . . . “

Although proud their town had been chosen for the hourlong demonstration, residents commented in local news stories that there was no noticeable change in service. Their lights, they said, had simply blinked off, then on again, and continued operating normally.

“It was very undramatic,” recalled James Whitaker, owner of Whitaker’s Hardware. “We were like, ‘Oh, so what.’ The only reason anyone paid any attention was because it was on television.”

Others wondered whether Southern California Edison had made the whole thing up for publicity purposes.

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In a column entitled “Interesting No Doubt, but Partially Phony,” one unimpressed editorial writer denounced the switch-over as nothing more than “hocus pocus.”

“Whether it was indeed 100% current from the atomic reactor plant, as the scenario directed, or the customary blend of juice that is served by Southern California Edison wouldn’t seem to us to make much difference--either one would activate the lamps,” the editor wrote.

But Edison officials considered the Moorpark experiment a milestone, marking the first time that an investor-owned utility had generated and distributed electricity to an entire community from a non-military reactor.

The events of Nov. 12, 1957, officials said, would pave the way for other larger commercial reactors to be placed into service around the country, ushering in a new era in the development of atomic energy as an alternative fuel source.

“Scientifically, it was a very successful experiment,” said A. C. Werden Jr., one of Edison’s atomic engineers at the time. “We proved we could do it. We could furnish electricity to a community from a nuclear reactor.”

While some Moorpark residents dismissed the experiment as a headline-grabbing stunt, others believed there was more to it, that something revolutionary had indeed occurred.

“We thought we were getting in on the ground floor of this new type of power,” said Everett C. Braun, then superintendent of Moorpark High School. “We were quite excited. It was a new thing. . . . It was like the future was now.”

The town’s electricity had been generated by a small nuclear reactor built and operated in the nearby Simi Hills by Atomics International, a division of North American Aviation that later became Rockwell International.

Heat from nuclear fission in the reactor turned water to steam, which in turn powered Edison’s turbine generator, Werden said. During the Nov. 12 experiment, the reactor transformed 20,000 kilowatts of nuclear heat into 6,500 kilowatts of electricity.

“Our primary interest was to develop a new source of electrical generation, and to interest others” in doing the same, Werden said. “It worked out very well.”

The Moorpark experiment had its beginnings in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, aimed at finding commercial, non-military uses for the new atom-splitting technology.

Throughout the 1950s, the government encouraged electric utilities to promote and develop atomic power as a future energy source that would serve as an alternative to less efficient, more polluting fossil fuels.

Atomic power was heralded as a potentially inexhaustible source of energy. Edison officials calculated that three pounds of processed uranium fuel released the same amount of heat energy as 60,000 barrels of oil.

In March of 1956, Edison announced it had signed a contract with Atomics International to generate heat produced from a sodium-cooled reactor built at its Santa Susana facility, at the time a major nuclear research and development site.

Atomics International personnel would operate the reactor and Edison employees would run the electric utility portion of the plant.

The purpose of the joint project would be to determine “the technical and economical feasibility of constructing, at a later date, full-size nuclear installations having the output of modern conventional power plants which use oil or gas as fuels,” Edison’s General Manager James F. Davenport said at the time. Edison committed more than $1 million to the experiment.

By July, 1957, Edison began providing some of its Simi Valley and Moorpark customers with electricity generated from the nuclear plant. But residents were not aware of the experiments that were taking place.

Many workers on the Edison project, like carpenter and Moorpark resident Tom (Buck) Conner, were also kept in the dark.

“We didn’t know what we were working on,” Conner said. “But in those days, construction workers didn’t give a damn about anything. All they cared about was where the party was going to be next Saturday night and who made the best beer.”

Edison gave its Moorpark subscribers only five days notice that their town would be the first in the country to be lighted exclusively with nuclear-generated electricity.

The town was chosen because of its proximity to the Santa Susana lab, and because of its size--only 1,146 people lived there at the time.

When it was over, “there was a feeling around town that the whole thing had been much overrated,” Whitaker said. “It was just a short little zip on TV.”

Still, Whitaker said when residents look back on the event they understand that Moorpark has its place in history.

“Moorpark is a small town,” he said. “It doesn’t have a great deal of outstanding history. This is one thing it does have.”

After the experiment, Werden said Edison continued for a few years to use the Santa Susana reactor to supply power to some of its Moorpark and Simi Valley customers. The project was eventually discontinued because Atomics International wanted to use its sodium reactor for other experiments.

But the Moorpark project pushed Edison to explore the field of nuclear technology further, said spokesman David Barron. The company would go on to construct a nuclear power station at San Onofre in Orange County during the mid-1960s, where two of three reactors continue to operate, he said.

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Despite successes like San Onofre and elsewhere, nationwide opposition to nuclear power has remained firm in light of accidents at nuclear power plants around the world. Even the sodium reactor at Santa Susana suffered a partial fuel melting accident in 1959, although the public did not learn of it until the late 1970s.

Because of concerns over major environmental damage and the threat to public safety, no new plants are being built in the United States, and several have been shut down over the last 10 years.

Still, Werden, who retired from Edison in 1969, said the country should not give up on nuclear power.

“I think it’s a big mistake,” Werden said. “The reason we even got into this was because the Atomic Energy Commission said sooner or later we’re going to run out of fossil fuels, so we’d better develop an alternative source to back it up.”

But even Werden acknowledged that no one has yet come up with a truly safe and satisfactory way to dispose of burnt radioactive fuel.

“That’s still a problem,” he said.