On This Day: When Britain led the atomic age
On this day in 1956, Calder Hall became the first nuclear power station to supply domestic electricity, so what went wrong? Asks Eliot Wilson
Sixty-nine years ago today, on 27 August 1956, the United Kingdom reached an extraordinary scientific and industrial milestone. Calder Hall Nuclear Power Station near Seascale on the coast of Cumbria was connected to the National Grid, and became the first nuclear plant in the world to supply electricity for domestic use.
Calder Hall’s four carbon dioxide-cooled Magnox reactors – each weighing 33,000 tonnes, ten times a contemporary Daring-class destroyer – had the capacity to generate 240 MWe, enough for hundreds of thousands of homes, and must have been a striking contrast to the coal-fired plants on which Britain had up till then relied. Atomic energy powering domestic appliances, just 11 years after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: this was truly the beating of swords into ploughshares.
What seems even more remarkable today is that the power station had been built in almost exactly three years. Once the Ministry of Supply, which would cede responsibility for nuclear energy to the new UK Atomic Energy Authority the following year, had agreed the project, construction started on 1 August 1953.
Taylor Woodrow, the civil engineers in charge, had expanded from a modest house-building enterprise to formidable all-rounders thanks to the Second World War, during which they had built camps, airfields, factories and the temporary Mulberry harbours to supply the Allied armies after the D-Day landings. Some of that urgency remained but it was becoming rarer; when they built Sizewell A in Suffolk, completed 1966, it took five years; Wylfa in Anglesey took eight. Hartlepool Power Station, finished in 1983, had taken 15 years.
Electricity generated by atomic energy being delivered into the homes of ordinary Britons seemed futuristic and captured the zeitgeist. Six months later, in January 1957, American network ABC screened an episode of Walt Disney’s Disneyland entitled “Our Friend The Atom” hosted by Disney’s chief scientific consultant, Dr Heinz Haber; the former Luftwaffe pilot and Nazi scientist explained in simple, clear terms the wonders of nuclear fusion and fission. But for Calder Hall this was entirely a second-order benefit.
Although it was owned and operated by the UKAEA and later by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, Calder Hall was built to produce plutonium for the United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons programme.
While Britain had been at the cutting edge of atomic research in the 1930s and early 1940s, its weapons research had been subsumed by America’s Manhattan Project because of the vastly greater resources at the disposal of the US government. There had been profound shock when the Truman administration had brought in the McMahon Act in 1946 and ended collaboration on research, and Whitehall debated whether it should pursue its own independent programme.
A mood of grim determination
At a cabinet committee meeting in October 1946, the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, had caught the mood of grim determination after a bruising encounter with his American counterpart, James Byrnes.
“We’ve got to have this thing. I don’t mind it for myself, but I don’t want any other foreign secretary of this country to be talked at or to by the Secretary of State of the United States as I have just been in my discussion with Mr Byrnes. We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs… We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it.”
On 3 October 1952, in the Montebello Islands off Western Australia, Britain detonated its first atomic bomb in a test codenamed Operation Hurricane. The 25 kiloton device left a crate 20 feet deep in the seabed; of HMS Plym, the River-class frigate which had carried it, only a “gluey black substance” remained. The United Kingdom had joined the US and the Soviet Union as the third member of the nuclear club. Thirteen months later, the first Blue Danube nuclear bombs were delivered to Bomber Command at RAF Wittering, though it would be another 18 months until aircraft capable of carrying them came into service.
Calder Hall was originally designed for a lifespan of 20 years. Because of its military involvement, however, it had spent some periods of time shut down, prolonging its longevity, and it did not finally close until 31 March 2003, by which time the oldest reactors had been in operation for 47 years. The cooling towers were demolished, the reactors defuelled and the spent fuel taken for reprocessing. The site is now owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and by 2027 only the reactor cores and their radiation shields will remain.
It really was Britain leading the world. The design of Calder Hall’s Magnox reactors was sold to Italy and Japan, and showed that nuclear energy was practical, safe and sustainable. It was the birthplace of the civil nuclear industry
It really was Britain leading the world. The design of Calder Hall’s Magnox reactors was sold to Italy and Japan, and showed that nuclear energy was practical, safe and sustainable. It was the birthplace of the civil nuclear industry.
We are now waiting for Hinkley Point C in Somerset to be completed. It is hoped it will become operational in 2029, a 12-year build. It is owned by the French and Chinese governments.
Eliot Wilson is a writer