Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Dec. 29 at the age of 100, was engaged in nuclear power issues dating back to the 1950s when, as a young naval officer, he helped with cleanup of a partial meltdown at the Chalk River research reactor in Canada, according to various published accounts.
The Carter Center announced Carter’s death in a statement. Carter entered home hospice care in February 2023 at age 98
Months after entering the White House in 1977, Carter oversaw the birth of today’s Department of Energy, signing legislation that combined nuclear weapons programs from the Manhattan Project era with various federal government programs for energy.
Carter also made a memorable visit to the Three-Mile Island nuclear site in Pennsylvania days after the accident that spooked the nation in March 1979.
The accident occurred shortly after the release of a major motion picture, “The China Syndrome,” starring Jane Fonda, about a nuclear accident at a fictional commercial power reactor in California. Carter visited the plant on April 1, 1979, in spite of public fear that a hydrogen bubble at the Three Mile Island plant might explode.
As president, Carter also halted nuclear fuel reprocessing in the United States, citing nuclear arms proliferation concerns. Although President Ronald Reagan would lift the reprocessing moratorium in 1981, domestic reprocessing had not resumed as of Carter’s death.
According to his official biography, after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy and eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant, Carter was chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1949 for the embryonic nuclear submarine program.
In the 1950s, Carter was one of several Naval officers tapped by Rickover to go to the Chalk River nuclear plant where a power surge ruptured the reactor and rendered it unusable. “Carter and his 22 other team members were separated into teams of three and lowered into the reactor for 90-second intervals to clean the site,” according to an article by Military.com. Carter told CNN in 2008 that he had radioactivity in his urine for six months afterward.
As things turned out, Carter would leave the Navy’s nuclear power school before finishing the program, prompted by his father’s death to return to Georgia and help run the family peanut farm.
