Editing Shippingport Light Water Breeder Reactor (section)

== Background ==

The Shippingport Atomic Power Station was the first full-scale commercial nuclear power plant in the United States, entering operation in 1957. It was originally fuelled with conventional enriched uranium and operated as a pressurised water reactor (PWR) under the direction of Admiral Hyman Rickover's Naval Reactors programme.

In 1965, Rickover initiated the LWBR project — a plan to convert the Shippingport reactor to demonstrate thorium-based breeding using a light water reactor design. Rickover was motivated by a genuine interest in thorium as a fuel and by the challenge of demonstrating breeding in a thermal neutron spectrum, which conventional nuclear theory regarded as difficult or impossible.