Manhattan Project by Goodyear Tire to encase the reactor. On 2 December 1942, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiated the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in an experimental reactor known as Chicago Pile-1. The point at which a reaction becomes self-sustaining became known as "going critical". Compton reported the success to Conant in Washington, D.C., by a coded phone call, saying, "The Italian navigator [Fermi] has just landed in the new world." In January 1943, Grafton's successor, Major Arthur V. Peterson, ordered Chicago Pile-1 dismantled and reassembled at Red Gate Woods, as he regarded the operation of a reactor as
Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station of threats to public health and the environment. The groups have filed 14 contentions with the NRC, claiming that a new plant would pose "radioactive, toxic and thermal impacts on Lake Erie's vulnerable western basin." In May 2015, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a combined construction and operating license for Fermi 3, but DTE Energy stated there were no plans for construction at that time. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's 2010 estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Fermi was 1 in 238,095 making it the 88th least likely