The Nuclear Power Decisions

British Policies, 1953-78

Roger Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032807904
• eBook ISBN: 9781000007541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Originally published in 1980. More so than any other energy resource, nuclear power has the capacity to provide much of our energy needs but is highly controversial. This book discusses the major British decisions in the civil nuclear field, and the way they were made, between 1953 and 1978. It spans the period between the decision to construct Calder Hall – claimed as the world's first nuclear power station – and the Windscale Inquiry – claimed as the world's most thorough study of a nuclear project. For the period up to 1974 this involves a study of the internal processes of British central government. The private issues include the technical selection of nuclear reactors, the economic arguments about nuclear power and the political clashes between institutions and individuals. The public issues concern nuclear safety and the environment and the rights and opportunities for individuals and groups to protest about nuclear development. The book demonstrates that British civil nuclear power decision making had many shortcomings and concludes that it was hampered by outdated political and administrative attitudes and machinery and that some of the central issues in the nuclear power debate were misunderstood by the decision makers themselves.

PART I: 1955–64

1 DRAMATIS PERSONAE

By the mid-seventies it was apparent to every reasonably informed member of the British public that nuclear power had become highly controversial and that there were important differences of view in respect of this technology and its contribution to the country’s energy economy. It was also apparent that Britain’s dilemmas were shared by other states, albeit with differences of emphasis. Having tacitly assumed that the basic facts were rooted in arcane science, the average layman was in an awkward position. Civil nuclear energy, it seemed, would indeed have a major impact on his future and on that of his descendants, but perhaps not inevitably for good, as he felt he had hitherto been led to believe.

Why had this subject become a matter for general political debate only in the seventies – why not in the fifties when civil nuclear power first got underway, or in the sixties when opposition to nuclear weapons prompted major demonstrations? There were, as it happens, some heated political arguments about British nuclear power during those decades, but these arguments were essentially ‘private’ ones between the principal institutional bodies directly involved. They centred on such questions as the amount of nuclear power to which Britain should commit herself in a given period, the type of nuclear reactor technology on which this commitment should be based, the industrial structure through which it should be constructed, the distribution of the financial burden as between the taxpayer and the electricity consumer, and the consequences for other energy industries, especially coal. The underlying premiss in all these earlier arguments was that the development of nuclear energy was desirable, even, in the long run, essential. To this belief there was in the fifties and sixties no significant dissent. Even the electricity authorities and the coal industry, both of which at different times questioned the scale and economics of Britain’s nuclear programme, never seriously challenged the ultimate justification for the development of the technology.

The various ‘private’ nuclear issues were not all equally resolved when the situation was altered in the seventies by the activities of the international environmental movement. This movement, having established itself as a political force to be reckoned with, settled on nuclear energy as one of its targets, indeed in many senses its chief one. Even then, for several reasons to be considered later, opposition to nuclear power in Britain was considerably slower to become mobilised than was the case in the United States and in Western Europe. Nevertheless, by 1975 the ‘private’ politics of British nuclear power had been overtaken by a distinctly ‘public’ politics. The new ‘public’ issues were quite different in character and consequence. They amounted to questioning the fundamental attractions of, and need for, nuclear power, particularly bearing in mind the doubts objectors had about the safety of the various types of nuclear facilities, their fear for the impact of nuclear power on civil liberties, and their wider concern that civil nuclear power development could not but promote nuclear weapon proliferation.

There was also a second transformation in the mid-seventies, the ‘energy crisis’ brought into sharp focus by the Middle East war of 1973. Those who had always regarded nuclear energy as the only long-term solution to the world’s, and Britain’s, energy needs, now felt the case for its rapid development to be even more urgent than they had all along maintained.

The environmental and energy crises necessarily made nuclear energy a target for worldwide political debate. Britain’s circumstances were further complicated in that her short-term energy demand was depressed and her medium-term energy supply situation unusually healthy, the former largely due to the world recession, the latter thanks to North Sea oil and major coal reserves.

That nuclear energy had become so publicly political bewildered many in the British nuclear industry. After two decades of grappling with technical and managerial difficulties, and with the ‘private’ political problems, their frame of mind was already ‘not unlike that of Cinders after the ball’.¹ On top of this they now found themselves plunged into an intense and public controversy, and furthermore, having become used to high public esteem, had now instead to get used to having their judgement, and even their motives, questioned. This book is concerned with both the private and the public politics of British nuclear power. To that end the rest of this chapter sets out some of the more basic facts, briefly noting in turn the British nuclear programmes, the reactors of which they were composed, the institutional actors and some of the key individuals in the story. These facts are expanded and discussed in subsequent chapters.

Britain embarked formally on a programme of civil nuclear power stations in February 1955. The provisional programme was for 1.5–2GW over ten years, twelve stations being envisaged, the first eight to be based on the same type of reactor, the last four perhaps drawing on a different one. (To get the scale of this programme into perspective, the public electricity system had an installed capacity of some 20.7GW at this time.) The rationale of the 1955 programme rested on three things: the technical feasibility of nuclear power stations; the apparently urgent need for them given the energy shortfall anticipated at that time; and the assumption that their economics would not compare too unfavourably with those of conventional power stations.

In March 1957 the 1955 programme was in effect about trebled. There would now, it was planned, be 5–6GW of nuclear power by 1965. In fact, by 1957 the economics of nuclear power had already begun to worsen relative to conventional power, and this deterioration continued thereafter. In the autumn of 1957 the target date for completion of the new programme was indeed put back to 1966, but it was not until June 1960 that the Government announced an official reduction in the construction schedule for nuclear power. There was now to be a maximum of 5GW of nuclear power in the first programme, and the programme was also to be stretched so that it would complete in 1968 rather than in 1965/6. In the event, reactor power output having increased more rapidly than had been foreseen, there were only nine stations in this first programme, and they were all based on the same type of reactor.

With the first programme coming to an end, it became necessary in the early sixties to consider the appropriate policy to be followed subsequently. There ensued a political crisis with technical, economic and institutional dimensions. This effectively began in 1961 and was not resolved until 1965. It centred on the reactor type to be adopted for use in the stations of a postulated second programme. The choice really lay between two varieties of American reactor and a new British reactor which had been developed from the one used for the first programme. On the basis of a comparative appraisal of alternative designs for an actual station, Dungeness B, a decision was made in 1965 in favour of the new British reactor. It was held that this decision had been arrived at strictly on economic grounds and that the new reactor would produce electricity not only more cheaply than the American alternatives, but even more cheaply than new coal-fired stations. Herein lay a new source of political disagreement, the opposition of the coal industry. In due course it also became clear that the reactor crisis of the early sixties had deflected attention from another pressing issue, the structure and health of the private nuclear industry.

When complete the second programme will consist of five stations totalling 6GW, but the first of these began to come on stream only in 1976. This was because the new construction programme encountered difficulties which were often extremely severe. Some of these were technical, others organisational. Cumulatively, the problems were such that by the early seventies it had come to seem very unwise to order further stations based on the same reactor until the type was proved in commercial service, which could not be for some years. As a result the early seventies, like the early sixties, were a time of crisis for British nuclear power, and again a technical question was central. The American reactor types which had been promoted a decade earlier were still in the offing, and even a return to the obsolete reactor of the first programme was half considered. In 1973 a Nuclear Power Advisory Board was established to assist the responsible minister.

In the end, as in 1965 so also in 1974, the eventual choice was a British-developed reactor, though not on this occasion from the technological mainstream of British reactor development. In this instance approval was given only for a deliberately modest programme, 4GW of starts over four years, for operation, given the lead times by now typical, some time in the early or middle eighties.

Almost at once the reactor crisis returned. The new reactor appeared after all not to be suitable. Yet again one of the American reactors had to be considered. But by 1977 the British reactor of the second programme had re-entered the picture, that programme’s first two stations having at last begun to operate in 1976, and in 1978 it was for two stations based on this that government approval was forthcoming. In respect of subsequent orders however, the door appeared this time to have been left significantly more ajar than ever previously for an American reactor at a later stage.

The reactors of the first programme became known as Magnox after the magnesium alloy used as canning material for their fuel. Those of the second programme are advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs), and those of the third as laid down in 1974 were to have been steam generating heavy water reactors (SGHWRs). The two American reactors considered in 1965 were both light water-cooled reactors (LWRs), the boiling water reactor (BWR) and the pressurised water reactor (PWR). In 1965 the BWR was the front runner of these but in 1974 and 1977 only the PWR was seriously considered. The SGHWR had some features in common with the Canadian CANDU reactor, and this reactor was itself tentatively considered for Britain in the early sixties and again mentioned as a possibility in the seventies. In addition to Magnox, the AGR and the SGHWR, Britain also developed two other reactor types. These were the high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTR), undertaken in conjunction with a European group, and the fast breeder reactor (FBR). There seemed in the late sixties/early seventies a possibility that the HTR would soon enter into Britain’s commercial plans, but its development status and general prospects were ultimately judged in 1974 to be too problematic. Commercial ordering of the FBR having long been anticipated, at the time of writing (spring 1979) still remained an uncertain future prospect. By the mid-seventies the future of this reactor had become the most controversial of all nuclear power questions.

From the immediate post-war years Britain’s work on nuclear energy was divided into three parts. These were research, weapons research, and production, and in 1954 the three became separate groups of a new Atomic Energy Authority (AEA). The production section of the AEA became known as the Industrial Group and upon it fell the main task of reactor development. The AEA Act of 1954 stipulated that three of the Authority’s members should have had wide professional experience in nuclear energy, and the original members in this category were also given executive responsibility for the Authority’s three groups. Christopher Hinton, later Sir Christopher and later still Lord Hinton, was thus both Member for Engineering and Production and Managing Director of the Industrial Group until, in September 1957, he was appointed chairman of the newly created Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). Sir Christopher was one of the original ‘nuclear knights’, Sir John Cockcroft oft in charge of the Research Group at Harwell and Sir William, later Lord, Penney in charge of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston (AWRE) being the others.

In the first decade the AEA had two chairmen, Sir Edwin, later Lord, Plowden from 1954 to 1960 and Sir Roger Makins, later Lord Sherfìeld, from 1960 to 1964. A deputy chairman was first appointed in 1961. This was Sir William Penney, who was afterwards chairman from 1964 until 1967, when he was succeeded by John, later Sir John, Hill. Both Plowden and Sherfield had previously been senior civil servants in the Treasury, and Penney, Member for Weapons Research and Development when the Authority were set up, was therefore the first chairman with professional experience of atomic energy, while Hill was the first chairman whose career had been on the civil side of the Authority.

Sir Christopher Hinton had continuous responsibility for the production side of Britain’s work on atomic energy, civil and military, from its post-war beginnings. On his move to the CEGB his executive functions at the AEA were assumed by his deputy, Sir Leonard Owen and in January 1958, W.R.J., later Sir William, Cook, deputy director of AWRE Aldermaston, was appointed to the AEA Board with policy responsibility for production and engineering. By this time the Industrial Group, whose headquarters were at Risley, was undergoing organisational difficulties. One remedy proposed was for the Group to be broken up to form smaller and more manageable units, but a report by the Fleck Committee, set up after the major nuclear accident at Windscale in 1957, argued rather that ‘great advantages’ accrued from keeping the development of reactors, fuel manufacturing and fuel reprocessing plants together in the same organisation. This Committee therefore rejected any division of the Industrial Group, in spite of noting their particularly ‘heavy burden’ and the fact that they were ‘considerably undermanned’, especially at the more senior levels.²

By 1959 the Industrial Group had grown to twice their 1954 size of 9,700 and were expected to grow further. The case for a division thus seemed irresistible, and the group’s functions were accordingly split between a Production Group and a Development and Engineering Group, the latter, with Cook also now in executive charge, taking over primary responsibility for reactor development. In 1961 the Authority decided to reorganise the resulting four groups into five, as far as possible concentrating in one all work on reactor design and development. This became the Reactor Group, Cook correspondingly becoming Member for Reactors. Cook’s term of office was extended for a further five years from 1963 but in the event he left the Authority in August 1964 to become Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser to the Minister of Defence. His successor was J.C.C. Stewart, previously Managing Director of the Production Group and Member for Production. Stewart resigned in December 1968 on becoming deputy chairman and chief executive of Babcock-English Electric Nuclear, one of the new design and construction companies set up at that time. Hans Kronberger then became Member for Reactor Development, with R.V. Moore becoming a M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part I: 1955–64
• Part II: 1964–5
• Part III: 1965–74
• Part IV: 1974–8
• Appendix 1: Summary of Main Actors, Reactors and Programmes
• Appendix 2: Principal Events in British Nuclear Power Development, 1953–78
• Appendix 3: Principal Events in the British Nuclear Debate, October 1975-May 1978
• Appendix 4: The Nuclear Reactor: A Highly Simplified Outline
• Appendix 5: United Kingdom Nuclear Power Stations
• Appendix 6: Selected Reactor Characteristics
• Appendix 7: The Consortia, Etc.
• Select Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index