The same power that could be released all at once to devastating effect could also be harnessed carefully in nuclear power plants, to produce electricity. There are now over 400 nuclear power facilities in 31 countries (still counting Japan and Germany, who are on the verge of completely shutting theirs down.) Experiments in Germany in the late 1930s showed a self-sustaining nuclear reaction chain could be built, and while an experimental reactor in Idaho was the first in the the world to produce electricity, it was Russia who built the first working one.

On this day, June 27, in 1954 the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant was built in the Russian “science city” of Obninisk, 62 miles south of Moscow. The location was chosen due to the large number of scientists and engineers that lived there and worked at the nearby First Research Institute Laboratory.

The plant was built as the Cold War was ramping up and both Russia and the U.S. were stockpiling nuclear weapons and their delivery mechanisms. Whether intended to be ironic or not, the single reactor unit at the plant was called AM-1, short for Russian Atom Mirny, meaning “peaceful atom.”