A UTILITY'S VIEWPOINT OF NUCLEAR FUELS MANAGEMENT Institute of Nuclear Materials Management

Welcome to Chicago and the nintli annual meeting of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management. Your meeting seems particularly appropriate as to time and place. The place is appropriate because Chicago and northern Illinois have pioneered in taking the atom down the research and development road. Chicagoland is perhaps more closely associated with man's harnessing of the atom and the development of commercial nuclear power than any other area. The time is appropriate because it was 25 years ago last December that Enrico Fermi and his colleagues at the University of Chicago \"landed in the 'New World.1\" A bronze plaque at the University commemorates this historic event. In simple eloquence, it states: \"On December 2, 1942, man achieved here the first self- sustaining chain reaction and thereby initiated the controlled release of nuclear energy.\" But it is not Fermi's scientific triumph alone which marks Chicago's pre-eminence in the nuclear field. One of the world's foremost research centers in the peacetime development of atomic energy -- the Argonne National Laboratory — is located nearby. Argonne produced three of the five reactor concepts in the Atomic Energy Commission's first civilian reactor program in 1954. One of these, the boiling water reactor, developed the early technology for our company's Dresden Nuclear Power Station.