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 Power Plant (Italy) Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Plant (Italy) Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Plant was a nuclear power plant at Trino (often referred to as ‘Trino Vercellese’, meaning ‘Trino in the Province of Vercelli’), in north-west Italy. Consisting of one 260 megawatt pressurized water reactor (PWR) from the vendor Westinghouse Electric Corporation, it operated from 1964 until 1990. Trino was in 1964 the third ever commercially operated PWR worldwide, and it had the second highest megawatt-capacity of them. It was closed down following the Italian nuclear power referendum, 1987. The experimental enrichment plant, EUREX, near the power plant, was closed down in 1984.