Konstantin Ignatyev

Next stop:Atomic City, ID. After spending night at South Butte I stopped at Atomic City for what supposed to be a quick refuel. I got stuck for about 3 wonderful hours chatting with Dwayne Paine, owner of the bar in Atomic City ( population: 26). Dwayne was engineer when they were building first (in USA) civil nuclear reactor there, and then dismantling it. He got cancer from it but is in the clear now and working with government on a settlement, his close friend was not that lucky and just passed away from his more severe case of cancer. That is the essence of travel: visit places and meet people and hear stories you would not ever hear anywhere else. I used to work for a company that had office in a former USSR top nuclear research facility (Kurchatovskiy Institut) and saw decaying remnants of gigantic apparatuses, and now I had a chance to visit similar place in USA. Note: Arco (a city nearby) claim to fame is to be a first city to be powered by electricity from civil use of nuclear power (July 17, 1955), which is not correct. First civil nuclear power use happened in USSR a year earlier in June 27, 1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obninsk_Nuclear_Power_Plant