Craters of the Moon in the Morning

We enjoyed a free breakfast of pancakes and eggs (actually, the three of us split two free breakfasts, plus we paid for a side order of bacon) at this Good Sam park's cafe, then headed out bright and early toward Craters of the Moon.  Both Liz and I had been here before, but it was Helen's first trip.  The stark beauty of the terrain is compelling, with the most recent lava flows being only 2000 years old, and another eruption was due within the next 1000 years.  The Visitor Center has an excellent film which talks about the "hot spot" of rising magma which has erupted and formed the Snake River plateau, and as the hot spot moved along the Great Rift eastward, it left ancient calderas across the plateau and into Wyoming, with the most recent great caldera being Yellowstone.

Most of the Monument is designated as roadless wilderness, but a nice loop road takes visitors along many key formations of the eruption that is Craters of the Moon.  From pahoehoe flows to aa deposits, the area is often only a surreal landscape of black rock against blue sky. 

Some areas have vegetated, varying from an ancient tree caught in the hardening flow of lava and used as an early way to date the formation...

...to fields of flowers, and assorted sporadic blooms in the desert:

 

The Visitor Center also described the animal life in the Monument, and we were on the lookout for any and all, but encountered only several chipmunks, an odd yellow grasshopper, and this burrowing wasp-like insect that was digging in the soil.

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We then decided to explore the atomic history of the area, and headed toward the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 (EBR1) Museum site east of Arco, which was and is part of the Idaho National Laboratories nuclear program. 

This first nuclear power plant in the USA was built in 1950, and now is decommissioned and President Lyndon Johnson added it to the National Registry of Historic Places in 1966.  It is a windowless building on the high plateau, and far from the other restricted research areas.

It has both a guided and self-guided tour, and we took the guided tour.  The control room starts the tour, and it has gauges, switches, and control panels right out of the 1950s (as of course it should):

One important concept of the EBR is that the reactor is a breeder reactor, meaning that it bred more plutonium-239 atoms than the uranium atoms it consumed.  EBR-II, also dismantled with a small display in this same museum, was even more interesting.  Built by the Argonne National Laboratory here in Idaho, it was shut down in 1994 and has been dismantled. Unlike Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukashima, this power plant was designed as an inherently safe nuclear power system which could shut itself safely down without human intervention in the event of an emergency.  This project was cancelled due to nuclear proliferation concerns (because the plutonium involved is also used for weapons)  despite this inherently safer approach to nuclear power which might have been developed and deployed more safely than other techniques. 

Tomorrow we head toward Grand Teton National park, and our first rendezvous with the other three groups on this trek toward Yellowstone National Park.