Preservation of Calder Hall

"This is the saddest place", wrote Julian Cope. "A beautiful stone circle looking out onto the Irish Sea on the west and the Cumbrian mountains to the east. Yet 400 yards away is... Sellafield nuclear power station".

The circle is known as Greycroft. It has not been excavated for over 40 years, but it is not this that has excited archaeologist Clifford Jones. He wants to save Sellafield.

Calder Hall at Windscale, or Sellafield as the authorities renamed it in 1985, produced weapons-grade plutonium, but it was also the world's first commercial nuclear power station, connected to the national grid in 1956 after construction began in 1953. With 19 other publicly owned nuclear sites, Calder Hall was passed to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in April. The plan is to cocoon the four reactors in concrete, and demolish the rest.

Jones once worked for British Nuclear fuels, and was responsible for building management at the site. "She was a very tidy old ship", he says, "internally quite magnificent, with brass fittings and dials, all set in a Dan Dare future".

He has asked English Heritage to list it as a historic structure, seeking preservation of parts "to provide for the future a reasonable representation of the world's first Magnox power station": a reactor, a heat exchanger building, a cooling tower and a turbine hall. If it is not saved, he says, in five years no Magnox power stations will survive.

Andrew Davison, English Heritage inspector for the north-west, admits it is the first time they have been asked to consider a nuclear power station, adding the proposal presents "interesting practical problems".

Jones says the Calder site can be made radiologically safe - "school parties could walk over the preserved reactor". Head of communications Bill Hamilton says the NDA has raised the idea of preservation in its draft strategy. Public comment is sought before mid November, when the strategy is put to the government (visit www.nda.gov.uk). There is local support. Copeland council has backed retention in principle, saving of a cooling tower.

"It's a steam engine", says Jones, now archaeology lecturer at Lancaster University department of continuing education, "a nuclear powered steam turbine. People thought it would give unmetered electricity. It was a huge leap forward. Now they're going to rip it all to pieces".

 

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Calder Hall

A Brief History

Nuclear fission was discovered in the 1930s. Starting in the 1950s, considerable research took place, particularly in the United States, the UK, France, Canada and the former Soviet Union, into the design and construction of commercial nuclear power stations.

In 1952, on the orders of the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Christopher Hinton, later to become Lord Hinton, began the task of designing and building Calder Hall. Construction of the Power Station started in 1953 and was designed, constructed and commissioned in less than 42 months. On 17 October 1956, Her Majesty the Queen opened Reactor number 1 at Calder Hall, bringing into service the world's first industrial scale nuclear power station. The reactor at Calder Hall was a prototype of the Magnox gas cooled reactor and over time three more reactors were constructed and operated successfully for 47 years. In their lifetime they have generated sufficient electricity to serve a city of 150,000 people.

On 31 March 2003, the plant ceased its job of generating electricity. Calder Hall was closed down after almost 50 years, by which point it was the world's oldest nuclear reactor.

It had been cutting-edge technology in the 1950s, but by 21st century standards its 196 megawatt capacity was considered small.

This important part of Britain's Industrial History is currently being decommissioned, however the "Nuclear Archeologist", Clifford Jones, is now working to preserve this landmark engineering project for future generations.

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