Antarctica's biggest town once ran on its own small nuclear reactor
From 1962 to 1972, McMurdo Station on Ross Island drew electricity from a portable nuclear plant that also turned seawater into roughly 14,000 gallons of fresh water a day. Today the base swells to as many as 1,200 residents in summer, making it the largest community on the continent.
The site sits on the southernmost bare ground in the world that ships can reach. James Clark Ross charted the area in 1841 with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and the sound was named after the Terror's Lieutenant Archibald McMurdo. Robert Falcon Scott built Discovery Hut nearby in 1902, and it still stands on Hut Point. US Navy Seabees opened the American base on 16 February 1956 during Operation Deep Freeze, and it became the logistics hub for the International Geophysical Year, a 1957 to 1958 effort involving 67 countries.
Of the seven bases the United States built for that project, only McMurdo and the South Pole station still operate. Everything bound for the Pole usually passes through McMurdo first, by aircraft or along a snow and ice road that has to be cleared again every year. The Navy gradually handed control to the National Science Foundation and left entirely in 1993.
The reactor made sense because fuel oil in the 1950s accounted for about half the weight of all cargo shipped to Antarctica, and oil heaters posed a fire risk. Built in modules small enough to fit in a C-130, the 1.8 megawatt plant proved costly and was shut down over worries about stress corrosion. Diesel generators installed in 1982 now supply power, with their waste heat warming buildings.
Life follows the sun. Polar night runs from about April to September, and once darkness and cold set in there are usually no flights until July or August; winter fly-ins beginning in 1967 cut isolation to around four or five months. No woman wintered there until 1974, when Mary Alice McWhinnie and Mary Odile Cahoon stayed from April to October. The base has tested hovercraft driven by kitchen staff, grown greens in a greenhouse since 1989, and measured the thinning ozone layer in 1990.
Source: McMurdo Station
