Behind an unmarked door in a faded business park outside Kelowna, British Columbia, in a maze of rooms crowded with desks, computers, and floor-to-ceiling shelves, Chuck Fipke sifts through 20-pound bags of dirt.

"We take samples, hey, from gravel and streambeds all over the world," Fipke says. He sieves the earth, runs it through magnetic drums and centrifuges and electromagnetic separators. Then his technicians, working with scanning electron microscopes, separate out grains and mount them on postage-stamp-sized squares of epoxy. It's painstaking work but worth the trouble. Fipke has learned to understand those grains of dirt, and that understanding has led him to diamonds.

Eighteen years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond — as far as anyone knew. Diamonds came mostly from Australia, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Russia. De Beers mined 75 percent of the world's output, much of it tainted by controversial "blood diamonds," sold to fund African wars.

Stones from the Ekati Mine.
Photo: Andrew Hetherington

Today, Canada is the world's third-largest producer, by value, of rough stones. In the Northwest Territories, BHP Billiton's Ekati mine has been producing since 1998 and Rio Tinto's Diavik mine since 2003. De Beers opened its first Canadian mine, at Snap Lake, in July — a confirmation that Canada is the new center of the world.

The story behind the addition of Canada to the ranks of diamond-producing nations leads back to one man: a short, absentminded Canadian geologist named Chuck Fipke. When he discovered diamonds in Lac de Gras, Northwest Territories, in 1991, he started the largest staking rush in North America since George Carmack found gold in the Klondike a century earlier. And he's not finished: He's prospecting around the world, toting gravel samples back to his lab in British Columbia to figure out where to look for his next big strike.

In 1970, fresh out of the University of British Columbia with a degree in geology, Chuck Fipke signed on with mining company Kennecott Copper to look for gold and copper in Papua New Guinea. A helicopter would drop him off alone in the middle of a jungle, and pick him up at the end of the day. The terrain was so rough that the chopper often couldn't land — Fipke would just leap out as it hovered close to the ground. One day he turned around to face 20 locals, arrows strung. He raised his arms, slowly removed his vest, and offered it to "the one who looked like the chief." By the time the helo returned for him, Fipke was in his underpants clutching a fine array of tribal shields, bows and arrows, and fetishes. "I've got an amazing collection of stuff!" he says.

Fipke is a small man with a shaved head, a burnished tan, piercing blue eyes, and forearms like Popeye's. As a kid, his frantic start-stop mind made people think he was stupid. After getting his high school girlfriend pregnant, he agreed to marry her ... and then failed to show up for the wedding. (The couple eventually married after the baby was born.) He stutters and says "hey" in almost every sentence. He frequently loses his glasses and his keys, shows up late to appointments, and has a history of spending prodigious amounts of money in strip joints. His nicknames have included Captain Chaos and Stumpy.

After stints in the Amazon, Australia, and South Africa, Fipke opened a mineral separation laboratory in British Columbia in 1977. A year later, Superior Oil hired him to go back into the field — to look not for metals but gems.

The wilderness around Snap Lake, in Canada's Northwest Territories, conceals a trove of diamonds.
Photo: Andrew Hetherington

The company already had a search method. A couple of years prior, a geologist named John Gurney, working with Superior's money at the University of Cape Town, hypothesized that certain common minerals might reliably form alongside diamonds. He used an electron microprobe to analyze geological structures called kimberlite pipes — the places you occasionally (but not often) find diamonds — and discovered that the presence of chromite, ilmenite, and high-chrome, low-calcium garnet did indeed predict a rich strike. He examined a host of pipes in South Africa that had these so-called indicator minerals and published a paper explaining his results.

The Snap Lake site is one of four diamond mines established in Canada in recent years.
Illustration: Bryan Christie

Fipke heard about Gurney's work on a tour of De Beers' Finsch Mine in South Africa and quickly turned himself into an expert on indicator minerals — combining what he understood of Gurney's work with results coming out of Russian labs and his own skills with field sampling. Superior had worked with Fipke before, back in his gold mining days, so by the time the company wanted someone to go look for kimberlite pipes northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado, Fipke was the best choice. He found half a dozen, but like 98 percent of the kimberlite formations in the world, they didn't contain diamonds in commercially viable quantities.

But Fipke knew that, 100 miles under those pipes, was a craton, a thick, old chunk of continental plate where diamonds form. Kimberlite pipes are created when magma bubbles up through a craton, expanding and cooling on its way up. If the craton has diamonds in it, the result is either a carrot-shaped, diamond-studded pipe reaching up to the surface or a wide, flat underground structure called a dike.

Fipke also knew that the craton underneath the pipes he had found ran all the way up the Rockies. With Superior's backing, he teamed up with a geologist and pilot named Stewart Blusson, formed Dia Met Minerals, and headed north.

By 1981, the two men were sampling the ground in Canada; they would eventually secure mining concessions on 80,000 square miles. "It was just me and Sewart and a floatplane," Fipke says. "We took all the supplies and all the samples in ourselves."

De Beers geologists, it turned out, were already there, relying on their own indicator mineral formulas. But Fipke and Blusson surmised that the indicators De Beers found had in fact been dragged far from the kimberlite pipe eons ago by a passing glacier. What they needed to do was look "upstream" for the point of origin. Fipke got a helicopter and flew back and forth over the Arctic Circle, using a magnetometer to track variations in magnetic field that would suggest kimberlite. After thousands of miles and hundreds of hours in the air, he found a promising site near Lac de Gras, a barren world of lakes and rock and muskeg a few hundred miles outside the Arctic Circle.

He'd been surveying for eight years. He hadn't found a single diamond. Superior had abandoned the diamond business. Dia Met's stock was trading at pennies a share. But based upon a few samples, Fipke estimated a diamond concentration at Lac de Gras of more than 60 carats per 100 tons — with about a quarter of the stones of good quality or better. (In kimberlite pipes that have gem-quality stones in commercial quantities, a concentration of 1 carat — 0.2 grams — per 100 tons can be profitable.) After six months of sampling, Fipke went public. It was 1991, and he had found a kimberlite pipe (buried under 30 feet of glaciated sediment) with a concentration of 68 carats per 100 tons — the first Canadian diamonds ever found. Shares of Dia Met rocketed to $70. Fipke had partnered with mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary Company (now BHP Billiton) to get the diamonds out; BHP opened the Ekati mine at Lac de Gras in 1998. Soon Dia Met's 29 percent share of the mine was worth billions. Fipke would go on to sell his chunk to BHP for $687 million, retaining 10 percent ownership in the mine, worth another $1 billion.

Today Canada's diamond business is soaring. The country's four working mines produced 17 million carats in 2007, up 23 percent from 2006. Diamonds from Canada now account for 10 percent of all diamonds by carat sold in the world. And the addition of more diamonds to the global market hasn't driven prices down. Average carat value has actually risen 15 percent, and the gems from the far north are untainted by the bad publicity that comes from an association with African wars.

Shortly before Fipke sold most of his Ekati claim to BHP Billiton, his marriage, faltering for years after so much time in the field, fell apart. At the time it was the largest divorce settlement in Canadian history. "Cost me $200 million, hey," Fipke says. "Best money I ever spent!"

Fipke now has mining projects in Morocco, Greenland, Canada, Angola, and Brazil. His laboratory bookshelves are heavy with mineral guides — and the family histories of thoroughbreds. Besides diamonds, he's now obsessed with horse racing. "It's a huge challenge, hey, and I like challenges even if they're risky," he says. "And I think I'm really going to do spectacularly well with horses." So far, so good: He has more than 50 brood mares in Ireland and Kentucky and 20 racehorses all over the world. His horse Tale of Ekati placed fifth in this year's Kentucky Derby. "I always go to the Derby with Bo Derek," he says, unlocking the door to a windowless room piled with maps and electron microscopes and computers. "She's a good rider, and she knows horses. And she's a lot of fun, hey! I'm gonna do for horse racing what I did for diamonds!"

The De Beers mine at Snap Lake is a labyrinth of crushers and separators.
Photo: Andrew Hetherington

Whether or not Fipke actually turns out to have an eye for horseflesh, his eye for the characteristics of crystals is unparalleled. He shows me rooms of glass flasks and tubes, the equipment for analyzing all those gravel samples. I peek through a microscope and see a rainbow treasure of sparkling gems: green chrome diopsides and red garnets — the low-calcium, high-chrome G-10s that mean diamonds are nearby.

Over many years in the field and the lab, Fipke has refined his understanding of this unique stew of minerals. "Everyone now knows that G-10 garnets with low calcium might lead you to diamonds, hey," Fipke says. "But how do you distinguish between a Group 1 eclogitic garnet that grew with a diamond and a Group 2 eclogitic garnet that didn't? They look the same." Custom software compares the grains' shapes and chemical compositions, analyzes them against 1,000 minerals that are intergrown with diamonds, and compares them against 10 fields of mineral groupings. If seven to 10 of the fields from one pipe overlap, Fipke says, "there's no doubt; it's full of diamonds. No one else out there can distinguish between these similar tiny particles of minerals that grow with a diamond and ones that don't."

Miners prepare to blow up a rock face.
Photo: Andrew Hetherington

"Look," he says, opening a folder on a table. He has thousands of photos of mineral grains magnified to the size of golf balls. Some are all sharp corners and jagged edges, some rounded. Since erosion and age wear the minerals down, "we can tell when we're getting closer to the source. If the edges are sharp, hey, we know they haven't traveled far from the pipe."

That level of geographic precision has allowed Fipke to stake more claims. He's even working in areas of Brazil where De Beers hasn't been able to turn a profit. "And Angola. Angola has the richest alluvial diamond river in the world," he says, "and there are thousands of diamond works there. But we're looking for the source pipes." Five years ago Fipke started making magnetometer survey flights over the Kwango River. Having identified 100 possible targets, he now has 40 men taking core samples 900 to 1,200 feet under the riverbed. "I'm there at the camp at least three times a year, hey, and it's much harder than in the Arctic. Your drilling equipment just gets buried in enormous piles at customs in Luanda and you can't get it. In the Northwest Territories it was cold, hey, and full of snow, but you get a good parka and you're a bug in a rug. Angola is the most inefficient place on earth!"

I start to ask another question, but Fipke has something else in mind. "I'm hungry, hey," he barks, as the door to the map room slams shut behind us. "Do you like oysters?" But we're not going anywhere: He has locked his keys in the room and has to call someone to drive in and open up his office.

We finally head into town. "Hi, Chuck!" says the hostess, leading us to the back room of a hip Asian fusion place. Around a long table sit 23 young women, all sporting stilettos and big hair. "Chuck!" they shout. We have, it seems, shown up at the bachelorette party for Fipke's granddaughter. The hostess seats us at the next table. Fipke orders four dozen oysters and a bottle of wine that has to be driven to the restaurant from some special cellar, and a young women shimmies into the booth next to Fipke. "Chuck," she says, kissing him on the cheek, "do you think you can pay for us all tonight?"

"Sure," Fipke says, beaming.

"Do you remember this?" says another woman — his daughter, it turns out, who slides in next to him, holding up a purse. "You bought it for me!"

With Fipke suddenly bankrolling the night, the girls break loose, and the restaurant staff starts hauling out the bottles of champagne. Pretty soon a couple of lasses are dancing on the tables, the oysters are slipping down, a second bottle of rare wine is being decanted, and Fipke is remixing the menu like Danny DeVito in Get Shorty.

And the tales spill forth: three week forays into the Peruvian Amazon, travels with the Kalahari Bushmen of Southern Africa, visits to the pygmies of the Ituri forest in the Congo. "I'd just leave my family and go, hey," he says. "I was really into native culture."

Somebody asks him about Brazil, and it reminds him of something important. "Caipirinhas!" he shouts out of the blue. "I want 25 caipirinhas!"

When the bill arrives, it's 3 feet long and $4,000. Fipke pays up, and we spill into the night — his daughter and granddaughter and their friends and now boyfriends, who joined us in the restaurant. On the street, Fipke suddenly leaps into the air and delivers a solid, suede loafer-clad foot to the head of a parking meter. "I fucking hate parking meters, hey!" he shouts. He jumps and kicks another one, and then erupts into a fit of giggles.

We are ushered past the velvet rope at the Cheetah Lounge, Kelowna's classiest strip joint, and Captain Chaos orders another round of caipirinhas for everyone. Three generations of Fipkes pound drinks as naked women dangle upside down from poles onstage.

The room is spinning by the time Fipke takes me aside and lays a big warm hand on my arm. "Hey," he says, "here's the thing. I learned that I did my best. I mean, I really tried my best. How many people can say that? I worked hard, and I mean really hard. I worked seven days a week from 8 am until 3 am. Every day. We drilled and drilled all winter when it was dark and the windchill was 80 below. Everyone thought I was crazy. But most people just never do their best, hey. And I did."

Contributing editor Carl Hoffman (carlhoffmn@earthlink.net) wrote about the private space company SpaceX in issue 15.06.

Whether your fantasy hotel is a Star Wars-style cave dwelling or a Hobbit hole in New Zealand, specialty accommodations around the world will fulfill your nerdy needs.

Other hotels geek out with crazy gear, from Apple- and Microsoft-themed suites to virtual golf courses. And while WiFi has become a common hotel offering, a high-tech hotel in the Middle East extends internet access all the way to its private beach.

These and other specialty accommodations make Wired.com's list of top geek hotels.

Hôtel Sidi Driss, Matmata, Tunisia

Left: The Tunisian town of Matmata is riddled with troglodyte dwellings, vertical caves dug out by humans and turned into homes. The Hôtel Sidi Driss is one such desert delight.

Geek factor: Does the cave hotel look strangely familiar? The interior was used as a Star Wars filming location — it's the Lars' homestead on Tatooine.

Hotel Sax, Chicago

Plenty of businesses have gotten into bed with Microsoft. Now you can, too: Chicago's Hotel Sax has a partnership with the software giant that lets weary travelers relax into "the Microsoft Experience."

Geek factor: The Studio, Hotel Sax's "Entertainment Lounge" available to all guests features Microsoft gear like Xbox 360s and Zunes. Don't want to share? Book your own private "Entertainment Technology" studio or suite.

Hotel 1000, Seattle

The operators of this high-tech hotel sank millions of dollars into the latest gear. With luxuries like ubiquitous WiFi, HD TVs and a "fully converged IP infrastructure" that allows for internet-enabled personalization of everything from room temperatures to the art on the walls, Hotel 1000 was a shoe-in for Hospitality Technology magazine's 2008 award for overall technology innovation.

Geek factor: After playing around on the hotel's virtual golf course, just flip the electronic "do not disturb" sign to keep hotel staff or annoying co-workers at bay.

Hotel Avante, Mountain View, California

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Hotel Avante is making a big play for big players. The 91-room boutique hotel bills itself — and its guests — as "smart, visionary, iconoclastic and artistic."

Geek factor: To further its "creative clubhouse" atmosphere, each room includes an "executive toy box" with a yo-yo, an Etch A Sketch, a Rubik's Cube, playing cards and a Slinky.

Capsule Inn Akihabara, Tokyo

Capsule Inn Akihabara is one of only a few places to stay in "Electric Town," Tokyo's anime/otaku hub and the site of the largest electronics market in the world. The tiny capsule rooms look like washing machines from the outside.

Geek factor: The hotel's sleeping units are "designed in the image of a jet airplane's cockpit" with every device in the capsule — TV, radio, alarm clock, lighting — designed to be controlled from a sleeping position.

The Pod Hotel, New York

With free WiFi, iPod docks, relatively inexpensive rooms (called "pods") and the opportunity to make new friends in its shared bathrooms, The Pod Hotel in Manhattan's Midtown East neighborhood is making a play for the Facebook generation. Antisocial guests will be pleased to know that some rooms have private baths.

Geek factor: Nicknamed the "Facebook Hotel," this place has its own social networking site to help guests find someone for dinner, drinks, shopping or whatever.

Tribeca Grand Hotel, New York

With its plush bar and 98-seat screening room, the Tribeca Grand is definitely swanky. But book an iStudio and you'll be pampered, Apple-style.

Geek factor: The iStudio rooms. They're decked out with Apple products, including a Power Mac G5, photo- and video-editing software and an iPod.

Woodlyn Park, New Zealand

Woodlyn Park is home to Billy Black's Kiwi Culture Show, with sheep shearing and a dancing pig. But the real star of the complex is The Hobbit Motel, two polystyrene-block units with circular doors built into a hillside.

Geek factor: You can pretend you're a hobbit.

Icehotel, Jukkasjärvi, Sweden

The Icehotel says it offers "an experience of a lifetime as well as an encounter with art and design that will surprise your senses." Since it's made of ice and snow, that claim sounds perfectly believable. You can book hot or cold accommodations at the Icehotel. Each ice room is designed by an artist, such as the one shown here by Andrea Thomson. Got the shivers? Heat up from the inside out at the Absolut Icebar.

Geek factor: The ice palace in the Bond flick Die Another Day was inspired by this hotel.

Emirates Palace Hotel, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Everything's superdeluxe at this Middle Eastern resort hotel, and it's even better if you step up a notch: All suites boast 61-inch plasma TVs (regular rooms have puny 50-inchers). All guest rooms have handheld computers that control switches and outlets — set your language preference for the interactive screens upon check-in.

Geek factor: Free WiFi reaches all poolside areas and even the private beach.

Hotel Tomo, San Francisco

From anime-inspired wall paintings to glow-in-the-dark desk blotters, Hotel Tomo kicks out the J-pop jams. See Wired.com's photo gallery on this Japanophile find, "San Francisco's Hotel Tomo Jacks Into Japanese Culture."

Geek factor: Deluxe gaming suites come with PlayStation 3, Wii, beanbag chairs and a 6-foot LCD projection screen.

Plink. Plink. Tink. One billion dollars of up-front investment and it all comes down to this: a slow but steady trickle of milky white pebbles dropping from a funnel into an acrylic jar. The jar is locked inside a glass case that's inside a vault that's inside the high-security Red Area of a prefab aluminum building on the Canadian tundra. Every 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year, miners for the South African company De Beers blast 3,150 tons of rock — enough to fill 80 trucks — from under the earth near this aluminum building and feed it into crushers, scrubbers, sifters, and x-ray machines. It's a lot of effort for a little, but the little is a lot: the equivalent of two coffee mugs a day full of rough diamonds.

Running a diamond mine in the Arctic is a mind-boggling undertaking. "This is a camp in the middle of nowhere," says Peter Mooney, manager of the processing plant at Snap Lake, "and a bloody horrible winter's day in Africa is the nicest summer day here. The real problem with diamonds isn't even their scarcity," he says. "It's that getting them takes a lot of science and engineering and lots and lots of money."

An aerial view shows the Snap Lake facility.
Photo: Courtesy DeBeers

Fipke doesn't work for De Beers — they're competitors — but the Snap Lake project, just like the ones at Ekati and Diavik, is part of the new era that Fipke created. The only way in is by air on company charter flights, except for six to 10 weeks in winter when ice road truckers — just like on the History Channel show — cart in fuel, mining machines and haul trucks, dormitories and parts for generators, conveyor belts, explosives.

On a 4,000-foot gravel runway, commuter planes and 737s trade approaches and takeoffs with C-130 Hercules flights full of cargo. After my ATR threads its way to the ground, a yellow school bus picks me up and drops me at a snaking series of linked prefab trailers containing sleeping quarters, offices, and a cafeteria. I fill out forms. I agree to be searched at any time. I agree not pick up any rocks from the ground, even the smallest pebble. Hundreds of closed-circuit cameras watch my every move.

Snap Lake is unusual — instead of blowing straight up to the surface, the magma followed a crooked path through fissures in the surrounding granite. Snap Lake's kimberlite is a 9-foot-thick, 2.5-by-1.6-mile seam angling slightly downward. It's also about 200 feet under a lake that's frozen most of the year. So all of Snap Lake's mining is underground — a cold, wet, black world of rising and falling tunnels constantly leaking water from the lake above.

Snap Lake miners work under the lake.
Photo: Andrew Hetherington

The operation consumes 25,000 gallons of fuel a day — and the work never stops. Miners drill holes in rock faces, insert explosives, and blow out over 1,500 tons of gray kimberlite per blast, twice a day. Trucks carry the ore to a large bin where it's stored. Then it's sent to a crusher that feeds the rock onto a mile-long conveyor belt that carries it to the surface, to the Blue Area, specifically a 5-story building of more crushers and sifters and shakers and screens and heavy liquid cyclone separators that pick out all the heavy ore. It's a roaring maze of steel grates and 60-foot staircases.

Eventually the conveyors pass into a more secure building-within-the-building, the Red Area. It's accessible only via a room the size of a closet; when the door behind me locks, cameras confirm that I'm alone. A green light tells me to proceed through zigzagging rooms that would be difficult to, say, kick a diamond through.

The ore passes down through another tower of sorters — x-rays illuminate diamonds. A secondary (and secret) process uses lasers to further refine the stream. At the end of the line, past an 8-inch-thick steel door and a set of steel bars, is the vault itself, a small room with half a dozen cameras and a big, rectangular glass box shot with glove-lined holes, like an incubator for premature infants. Stones — some the size of pin heads, others the size of gum balls — drop into a jar. Sometimes five minutes pass with nary a gem, and then two or three tumble out at once. Over the course of a year, there will be 1.2 million carats. Some are opaque; some are as clear as glass. Of the 430 men and women working here, no more than 60 will ever see this vault — or any diamonds. Ever. I slip my hands through the holes and into gloves, and pick up the biggest rock I see, a perfect 5-carat octahedral crystal three times older than the human species, formed during the age of the mastodons. A chunk of pure carbon, beautiful and banal. I ask how much it's worth. "Not allowed to say," Mooney says. "Put it this way: That's a hell of a lot of diamonds."

Dumptrucks loaded with ore exit Snap Lake mine.
Photo: Andrew Hetherington

Diamond jewelry has never moved me. But suddenly, holding this stone, I can't help it. I want one. The gears in my mind whir. And it's as if Mooney can hear them. "People get very clever," he says, "and very determined. We haven't had any theft here yet, but we check the gloves for holes every day." I gently place the stone back in the pile.

Exiting requires an additional turn into a room with an x-ray machine and a glass wall. Under the gaze of a man who says, "Don't worry, I've seen it all," I strip to my underpants, place my clothes and shoes and socks through the x-ray machine. Open my mouth. Show behind my ears. Sit in a chair and show the bottoms of my feet. Stand and run my fingers under the band of my underpants. There's only one hiding place left, which happily they don't check. I'm cleared and allowed to dress.

Dec. 2: It's a double milestone for nuclear energy. The first man-made sustained nuclear chain reaction was created this day in 1942. And just 15 years later, the first full-scale nuclear power plant went online.

1942: Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and their colleagues achieve a successful, controlled chain reaction in a squash court underneath the football grandstand of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. It lays the groundwork for the first atomic bombs.

Fermi and Szilard had been working on nuclear fission at Columbia University in New York, when Einstein wrote of their work to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein feared that German nuclear researchers might gain an unbeatable lead in the field and develop an atomic weapon that could win the war.

The Roosevelt administration responded with the then-secret, now-famous Manhattan Project. Top U.S. atomic scientists soon gathered in Chicago to see just how feasible it was to start a nuclear chain reaction, starting with a controlled rather than explosive one.

The original idea was to build a nuclear pile at a location in the Argonne Forest about 30 miles outside Chicago, but there were construction problems. Remarkably, the experiment was relocated to the University of Chicago campus inside city limits.

Construction began Nov. 16, 1942. The team got uranium from an Iowa State University researcher and Westinghouse Electric. Staffers worked around the clock to build a wooden structure on which they placed a lattice of 57 layers, comprising six tons of uranium metal and 40 tons of uranium oxide embedded in 380 tons of graphite blocks.

The whole apparatus was encased in a custom square balloon built by Goodyear Tire. The Chicago Pile-1 cost $2.7 million (about $36 million in today's money).

The Dec. 2 experiment began at 9:45 a.m. with more than 50 people in attendance. A three-man "suicide squad" was ready to douse the reactor in case it threatened to get out of control. Besides the main On/Off switch, there was a weighted safety rod that would automatically trip if neutron intensity got too high, a hand-operated backup safety rod, and "SCRAM" — the safety control rod ax-man, a top staffer wielding an ax to cut a rope to drop the safety rod, if all else failed.

The suicide squad wasn't needed. The pile achieved a sustained nuclear reaction at 3:25, and Fermi shut it down at 3:53. Those 28 minutes changed the world.

So secret was the project that at a party a few days later, the scientists' spouses didn't know what the all the congratulations were about. They wouldn't find out what had happened and where the technology was headed for another two-and-a-half years. And then, the world knew.

1957: The light-water breeder reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania — the first in the United States — goes to full power on the anniversary of Chicago Pile-1.

An experimental breeder reactor devised by Chicago Pile-1 veteran Walter Zinn had created the first nuclear-generated electricity in 1951. President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ground for the first commercial plant, to be operated by Pittsburgh's Duquesne Light Company, in 1954.

Westinghouse Electric designed the plant in conjunction with the Atomic Energy Commission. When it was in operation, nuclear fission heated water, which transferred its heat to convert the water in a secondary system into steam, which drove the turbine that created the electricity.

Shippingport shipped its first power into the Pittsburgh grid Dec. 18, 1957. Eisenhower returned to formally dedicate the plant the following May 26.

The plant was decomissioned in 1982 after a quarter-century of use. In the first complete U.S. decontamination, the reactor vessel was shipped to a low-level waste disposal facility at the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington.

After the Shippingport site was cleaned, the government released it for unrestricted use in 1987, suitable for picnicking or a children's playground. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated the plant as a landmark, and it's now open to visitors.

Sources: Argonne National Laboratory, American Society of Mechanical Engineers