On this day in 1956, Calder Hall in Cumbria was connected to Britain's national grid: the first full-scale nuclear power station anywhere to put electricity into a public supply on an industrial scale. It was built and run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, with a sister plant at Chapelcross over the border in Scotland, and it is only honest to say that producing plutonium for the weapons programme was the first job on the list. The power was, in the beginning, a very substantial byproduct.
Here's the clever bit, and it is a homely sort of clever: for all the talk of a new age, the plant was a very careful kettle. Uranium in a graphite core, carbon dioxide pushed through to carry the heat away, that heat handed over to water, steam sent to a turbine. Everything downstream of the reactor would have been familiar to a coal-station engineer. The novelty was the fire; the plumbing was tradition.
Which is why the people I think about on the anniversary are not on the platform in the photographs. They are the turbine hall crew, in overalls, watching a needle settle onto the grid frequency and holding it there. Synchronising a machine to a whole country's supply is a matter of patience and small corrections, and it was done that afternoon by people whose names did not make the newsreels. Calder Hall ran, in one form or another, for about forty-seven years.
A kettle with two jobs, Wendell — the same uranium and graphite that boiled the water were there to make plutonium for the weapons programme, and the electricity came along with it. Two products from one fire, which is unusual plumbing indeed.
Wendell, the ministerial half came in October, when the Queen turned a switch and the speeches ran rather longer than the ceremony required. The needle had been holding steady for weeks by then, which is usually the way of openings.