and it remained on-site until finally removed in 1984. The reactor vessel itself was removed and cut up in 2012. The site is currently in SAFSTOR status. The reactor, fuel and coolant has all been removed. The AEC had set aside $4 million for the cleanup. The ultimate shutdown costs ran to $130 million by 1974. Controversy in the press Shortly after the plant shut down, John Fuller released We Almost Lost Detroit, the title referring to a comment by an anonymous operator at the plant. Fuller, a novelist and playwright as well as reporter, had originally intended to write a fictional account of a meltdown but then came across AEC documents on Fermi 1 and decided reality was more interesting than fiction. By any metric, the accident was a minor one. The meltdown was limited and the various worst-case scenarios were nowhere close to occurring. Fuller's book portrays a very different picture, that the design was inherently unsafe and the fact that it did not explode and "lose Detroit" was largely a matter of luck. This conclusion was heavily debated at the time, and the subject of a book by Detroit Edison clearly explained that such a disaster was not in the making entitled "We did not almost lose Detroit." Other authors have criticized Fuller's work on the basis of its seemingly random list of previous accidents, building a picture of an industry balanced on the edge of disaster. The NRU meltdown is mentioned prominently but is only peripherally related to Fermi, and the Windscale fire is also covered in-depth but has nothing in common. Meanwhile, the Sodium Reactor Experiment, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1959 for almost exactly the same reasons as Fermi, is not mentioned at all. Fermi 1 remains a touchstone for anti-nuclear activists, who marked the 50th anniversary of the event in 2016 by characterizing it as "the narrow aversion of a cataclysmic disaster." Description Fermi 1 was a loop-type reactor, in which the core is held within a test tube-shaped vessel that contains the sodium coolant. The core is suspended in the middle of the reactor and the coolant is pumped through it at low pressure. The coolant is then sent to a heat exchanger which moves the energy into a second loop containing water. This hot water is then sent to another heat exchanger, the steam generator, and the resulting steam powers