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Glorious atomic new year of the Soviet people!

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Indian Point 3 has closed, ending generation of the units at the site. Here’s the cover of a promotional brochure from about 1960 promoting the future of the plant, showing Unit 1.

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“Science & sex”. Esquire magazine 1966.

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Happy Spring! We’re all interested in new technologies, so how ‘bout the enriched geranium reactor?

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Austrian nuclear plant at Zwentendorf: essentially completed in 1978 when a national referendum decided by a slim margin to abandon the plant.

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I’m getting a little tired of winter so I’m thinking of going to the Southern Hemisphere. Why not windsurf in South Africa near the Koeberg Plant? Love this addition to the postcard collection! #nuclear #southafrica #Atomic # vintage postcards #nuclearlaw

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Found a new card to add to the collection: an artists’s conception of the Fort St. Vrain plant north of Denver, CO.

Here’s another card issued when the plant had gone into operation in the late 1970s.

Although the plant only commercially operated for a decade until 1989, its high temperature gas technology may see a comeback with some of the advanced reactors being developed now.

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Atomic Ale - Atomium from Thin Man Brewing in Buffalo featuring the Atomium structure from the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels featured in this vintage postcard. It’s still there!

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Brunswick Plant, Southport NC - conceptual drawing and the plant as operating

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So what are the oldest “atomic” postcards I have? Probably several by a French illustrator Philippe Norwins from around 1910 when he did a satirical series on the contemporary obsession with radium as a miracle substance with unending possibilities. Radium had been discovered and isolated barely a decade before by the Curies. Eventually the adverse health effects on factory workers (e.g. the “radium girls”) and other uncontrolled exposure led to the development of standards for protection against radiation. Norwins shows a suitor being scoffed at by his girlfriend’s father as a penniless young man, until the young man shows he has 10 grams radium, at which point the future father-in law welcomes the suitor into his arms. Another card shows a gas-lantern lighter bemoaning the possibility that Paris will go to radium lighting, so he’ll just return to the town in which he was born. And the final one shows a blind man complaining about radium and its apparently curative effects, about which he doesn’t care because he wants to know whether he’ll still get his pension. #nuclear #atomic #radium #radiationprotection

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The 64th General Conference of the IAEA kicked off today, in part virtually, in Vienna. This is the annual high-level conference in the nuclear field to address safeguards, security, and safety. I was privileged to attend as part of the US delegation during my service as NRC chairman. I found a few cards marking the event, including one postmarked in the conference’s first year 1957, a first day cover with a stamp marking IAEA’s creation, a card showing IAEA’s headquarters at the Vienna International Center (which was under construction when I was a student in Vienna in 1974) and a card sent from a former colleague back to the NRC chairman’s office in 1992. #nuclear #safety #atomic #iaeagc

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Must have been a great year - just like this one!

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Kewaunee Plant, Wisconsin

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First nuclear power reactor in the Antarctic - card sent from location by McMurdo Sound and postmarked “US Navy Operation Deep Freeze”

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French anti-nuclear card from the 1980s, post Chernobyl accident

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Experimental floor of the High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven Laboratory, Upton, NY