NPR correspondent Geoff Brumfiel boards the NS Savannah, a nuclear passenger ship built in the late 1950s as part of a U.S. program to illustrate the positive uses of nuclear energy.
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Erhard Koehler, Senior Technical Advisor for the ship, climbs the passenger staircase from the lobby to the lounge area.
A tight hallway leads to the passenger rooms. Also on the ship: a swimming pool, a hospital bay equipped to perform surgery, and a barber shop. Koehler says the Savannah was fully booked throughout its history.
A passenger stateroom included a porthole with a view, as well as a sofa, desk, bed and bathroom.
The bridge would send orders to the reactor control room, which could change the power output of the nuclear core as needed.
Koehler and Brumfiel explore the deck of the ship.
Entering the ship from the deck. The reactor was located below in the forward part of the vessel.
From an observation deck, passengers could look down into the engine room and watch the reactor control room operators at work.
The ship's reactor control room sits next to the turbines that the nuclear reactor powers.
Engineers stood watch and controlled the reactor using the panels in the control room.
The scram button would shut down the reactor immediately. It could only be done from the reactor's control room (a similar button on the bridge would simply turn on a light below).
An atomic motif adorns the floor in the control room.
A wooden block in the main lobby illustrates the amount of uranium fuel needed to sail around the world more than a dozen times.
The Savannah has been moored in a Baltimore port since 2008. Last fall, its nuclear reactor was removed as part of its decomissioning.

The world’s only nuclear-powered passenger ship

As part of an ongoing series of wonder, NPR correspondent Geoffrey Brumfiel and I climbed aboard a mid-century time capsule. The NS Savannah was a proof-of-concept ship born out of the cold war, when the U.S. government sought to demonstrate the peaceful use of atomic energy. The Savannah, which in 1961 sailed with a 74-megawatt nuclear reactor, was part of a program called “Atoms for Peace” — messaging that ran throughout the high-tech design, from atom-themed light fixtures down to the dinnerware. Anyone could buy a passenger ticket in its brief history from 1962 to 1965.

By the 1970’s the reactor was shut down and de-fueled. It sat in storage in South Carolina for much of the 80s and 90s before being moved to a port in Baltimore for decommissioning in 2017.

Read the full story here.

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