Today marks the 65th anniversary of the first nuclear power generation anywhere in the world, at Calder Hall on the Sellafield site in Cumbria, UK.
A thread on how New Scientist saw the dawn of nuclear power...
A thread on how New Scientist saw the dawn of nuclear power...
The first issue of (The) New Scientist was published 3 months later. In it, T.A. Margerison asked “where do we go from Calder Hall?” The article called for a vast stepping-up of the UK’s atomic energy programme, but its predictions proved wide of the mark.
“Coal, as we all know, is scarce and expensive. It can be expected to become more so as the easier-worked seams are exhausted.” This situation proved to be short-lived, and we now have the opposite problem. books.google.co.uk/books?id=X6Xez…
There was a hand-drawn diagram of how Calder Hall's reactor worked. Margerison was sceptical about pressurised water reactors, which ended up being the main design used by most modern nuclear plants.
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