Atoms for power; International atom: England

A transcribed program produced by Purdue University under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center and cooperation with the National Association of educational broadcasters. Today's program recorded for the series on the international at home by the BBC in England takes us to Calder Hall where the world's first atomic reactors producing significant amounts of electric power are in operation. Standing up with my back to the sea looking inland the countryside rises

steeply with the Cumbrian sails and Dales which lead to the jagged horizon marked out by the mountains in the distance. This is a land of mist and clouds and rocks and deep valleys with lakes and white Rivers breaking down over the rocks Wordsworth's country and set down here. Most in Congress lay in this rural surrounding is called a hole. The atomic power station. Like anything very large is seen from a distance it looks like a model of itself which is belied by the tiny figures here and there on the buildings moving around and the odd whisp of steam from the powerhouse itself. The atomic power station seems isolated from all the normal lines of communication that one associates with the import of fuel for a

power station. There are behind me here no docks to bring no lines leading to the power station. The land is a rural land with green fields and little cottages. And yet this past Asian is producing over 90 megawatts of electricity which is an output equivalent to the yearly consumption of over a quarter of a million tons of coal. The first representative of the United Kingdom atomic energy authority whom I would like you to meet is Mr. Richard Moore who designed called we first had to decide what type of plant to build in Britain as in many other countries with an expanding industry. The need for power is increasing rapidly every year and so we felt we should design a sort of reactor which would produce electricity in

large quantities to enrich the uranium. A very costly and elaborate process. And so we decided to choose a type of reactor which would use the uranium in its natural form. Having made this decision the number of types reduces to a few and we may classify these in reference to the method by which we transfer the heat from the reactor to the boilers. But this purpose we can use water gas or liquid metal. We chose the gas cooling method. If we'd chosen water we could not have used ordinary water and natural uranium fuel we would have had to build a plant to make heavy water. And this is a very expensive plant. Furthermore if we do use water for this heat transfer we would need to pressurize it to something

like 20 times the pressure needed in a gas cooled plant and water this high pressure is a very corrosive material needing special materials or construction. The guest called reactor on the other hand besides being a very safe place and we can build using normal model steels and common materials of construction. What was required was a graphite block enclosed in a steel pressure vessel surrounded by a concrete shield seven feet thick prevent the escape of dangerous radiation and to lead the gas to the heat exchangers in and out of the reactor. The plant is going to be of considerable size the graphite block itself is about the size of a large living room. The surrounding steel vessel must withstand internal gas pressure of 100 pounds a square inch and yet provide access to the graphite for the loading and

unloading of the uranium and for the passage of the gas in and out of the plant. The vessel we designed is unique. It weighs some three hundred fifty tons and is built of two inch thick plate which at the time was the thickest. We consider that we could build reliably on site in the case of the heat exchanger. This was a vessel some 70 feet long and 17 feet in diameter which had to be built on the ground and raised into a vertical position and stood on its foundations 15 feet above ground level. The next part of the plant is handled with some 65 miles of cable. These are just a few of the problems that we've had to deal with in the design call. I'm standing now quite close to the atomic power station on the fringe of what is really a small township with streets and street lights

and small buildings which houses the clubs and canteens for the people who work here and just below me here on the right is a conventional electrical substation with the first of the tall pylons the steel towers which march off across the Cameron fells leading the power away into the national grid. To the west. Two gigantic concrete cotton real stand out against the sky the cooling towers which are common to any power station and behind them marching as it were in Linus turned towards the sea while the seagulls sweep in and out the buildings. The number one reactor building and then the turbine house a long and relatively low and perhaps two hundred yards behind number one. Number two reactor building and further to the east and array of Derrick's and cranes and scaffolding and shattering shows that call the hole is already being extended.

Number one reactor building. Right you know opposite me here is closed almost casually I would say In and Out to Sheryl of asbestos and gloss and talk by what looks like a glass conservatory. There are two tall black factory chimneys with yellow letters running up the side and from each corner of this great square building Black Pipes lead out to the huge black cylinders standing on end. These black cylinders are in fact the heat exchangers the boilers of the atomic power station and each one is closed in a delicate tracery of ladders. Inspection ladders and pipes and here are painted in different colors. The one over to the west there is bright red the one in front of me yellow and one which is blue peeps around the far corner. Standing beside me here is Mr. Andrew Young the engineer who was responsible for building the atomic

station to the plans of Mr. Richard Moore. Mr. Young when you first saw Mr. Moore's plans what did you think. Well I very facetiously said to Mr. MOORE Why have you spent so much time in making it difficult when there was a little extra effort you could have made it absolutely impossible. As a matter of fact now that it is built I really can't think that any major alteration of design would be justified. What was the most difficult task that you had. Well I would say that coordinating the civil engineering work with the mechanical engineering works because the whole thing had been timed to a very tight program which could not be allowed to get out again. Take these heated exchanges in front that I've just been describing. How did you get them out. Well first of all they were transported down in sections from Scotland. And when you remember that these are 17 feet wide it was essential that the whole of the road and the root of all these things should being surveyed. Bridges should be examined to see they carry the

loads and at one point not very many miles from here through a village. There is only three and a half inches clearance on each side of the section. When you finally got the heat exchangers down here and then well we then had to fabricate these various sections and we had to fabricate the heat exchanger horizontally of course. After it was completed and hydraulically tested it was then rolled onto a low load 32 we lose and each set of 4 wheel to steer it independently. This enabled us when we transported up the street opposite foundation. We could turn this vehicle at 90 degrees within its own axis. To steal a poll fabricated polls were already in position supported by a good guy ropes and from the where the rope attached to the heat exchanger girdle about a third of the way down and then holed up into position and landed on their foundations 15 feet from the ground.

Two hundred tons of the weight of these things and it takes an hour. Now that's a long time to have 200 tons hanging on the end of a hook and it is no job for a person with a duodenal else I can show you that. What about the actual reactor inside the building. What sort of problems that present. Well that thing completed is something like 70 feet high and thirty seven feet six diameter. That was fabricated in six sections on the ground and was transported to the reactor which was now 80 feet high and headache had already been erected with it with a boom extending out to the area which could easily pick up the section which had to be lifted swing it round and drop it into the octagon already built. The maximum lift on those was 100 tons. That again took an hour to lift and taking into consideration

two reactors 88 exchangers. I should point out that the welding problems on these were quite important in that every inch of where the X-rays and the pressure vessel itself was pressure tested and stressfully by that I mean that all the stresses built up during the welding process where relieved by bringing the whole of the vessel up to attempts of 600 degrees centigrade. Now just to recap the whole thing inside this pressure vessel there is the graphite block that is the moderator and inside the graphite block the rods of uranium. How did you get the graphite block in the pressure vessel. Well when you talk of a graphite block such as the one Mr. Moore referred to as being the size of a living room that is built up of over 50000 blocks to be quite frank with you and each of those blocks to build one on top of the other over the area

of the floor of the reactor vessel and are built to tolerances between five and ten thousand and then the whole of them that had to be planned on a production line basis as you get in machine shop. They cost $50000 or later something like six weeks. Was there any particular problem in the laying of this graphite apart from the number that had to be laid. Well yes there are the problem of having to maintain them just absolutely scrupulously keeping edition anyone going into the area had to strip down to the skin and be redressed with clothes provided to haul them all rings and watches had to be left outside. Anyone who wore glasses had to sign say they had glasses and to show they still had them on when they came out any extraneous matter other than graphite and fuel would reduce the efficiency of the pilot and in the construction of the Tevin there was an ordinary conventional job. Absolutely. There is only one innovation in it and that is that in addition to the ordinary

condenses you have on a house you have in this case what we call a condenser which means that you can still operate the reactor and pass steam from the heat exchangers through the condenser and from the condenser the cooling water still circulating through cooling towers without having to shut down the reactor. You know that if you were here for some reason you can't run. You can still run your reactor which doesn't like being shut down and opened up so many times it's young Give me some of the facts and figures how tall the cooling towers which are the tallest structures three hundred feet the main reactor buildings roughly a hundred twenty two hundred twenty feet and the heat exchangers 70 to 80 feet complete with a bend and so on. How many mean did you have here at the maximum 2100 2100 and how many different contract do you think when the maximum number of long time writing about 50 and of course one of our problems is to persuade each contractor that the site is

not here for his benefit alone. But they all have to take part in it and how long did all this take you in the first moment you looked at Mr. Miller's plans. Well three years I think three years is right. General Manager of the first commercial atomic power station in the world is Mr. A.G. Davy and I'm sitting now in his office. Mr. Davy How does one become general manager and comic bar station. Well I am basically a chemical engineer and I spent the war years in explosives in 1947. So Christopher Hinton asked me if I would take charge of this place. And I said sufficient for you to see that I had no special qualifications. I would claim to be trained in normal industry. As far as called a hole is concerned apart from the nuclear side you can regard it as an ordinary power station.

It will employ about four hundred fifty people but of those only about 12 need be connected directly with the problems of the reactor. All the other people one could find in an ordinary conventional power station. But how does your work differ from that of a man and of an ordinary station. It doesn't differ all that much. The problems are surprisingly common but of course we have some special ones connected with the nuclear reactor. But what sort of workers do you have here how do you recruit them. Most of them are recruited from West Cumberland. And before the war. This was a depressed area. The chief industries were coal and iron ore mining and we've taken these people and without any great difficulty trained them in this new type of work. They are quite ordinary people who've adept at themselves to the new

circumstances in quite a short time. Are these people organized into trade unions in the ordinary way that they would be in a conventional power station. Yes in precisely that way. I have the trade unions negotiate any special agreements with regard to the radiation hazards. The trade unions never demanded any danger money for example. There was talk of that in the early days but we are by saying we didn't want to take risks. We would make conditions which rendered the job Saif. And we've always maintained that if they carry out the rules and regulations laid down they are quite right. Another thing Mr David is the electricity produced by this type of blonde economically the same as the electricity produced by other types of atomic plant. We would say it will be called a hall is the first station of its type already. We feel that it will compete in price with a coal fired station but we expect

developments over the next year or so which will lead to economies. But why not talk to sequester Henton. Who is the managing director of the industrial group. He has done more than any other man and to make this project possible and certainly he has an excellent appreciation of all the implications. Well I think the DVD is really making a mistake talking about the cost of power from called the hall because what you have to remember is that called a hole in what we call a dual purpose stage. It is designed primarily for the production of Catoni and for defense purposes and it's producing electrical power as a byproduct. Now if we sold our plutonium from cold our whole the price that one can get from military plutonium the power produced as a byproduct would be ridiculously cheap it would be

far cheaper. The power can be produced in an ordinary conventional power station using coal or oil sure. And so in all yeah it's what we ought to do is to look at the cost of which we can produce electrical power from station built on the same lines called all DOD really optimize is so that it is designed primarily for producing electrical power for industrial use and producing plutonium as a byproduct. Now this cost was analyzed in the white paper in which the British planned for the development of indulgent industrial nuclear power was considered and the figures which were given there and in the light of our more recent experience they are clearly if anything to be on the conservative side well.

Well that from those stage we should expect to produce electrical power are out of our group's cost of Ragon less than a penny per unit. But there is a credit to offset against this because those will be producing plutonium as a byproduct and that plutonium won't we shan't be able to sell for defense purposes because obviously there's a limit to the amount of plutonium which is needed for proper defense. But plutonium is a fifth star material and it can be used as a fuel in other reactors. And so we are justified in giving credit for it as a fuel. And our lot of thought went in to all our determining what that created ought to be and all without going into detail or we came to the conclusion that when that credit had been given we ought to we ought we definitely sure

to be able to develop our electricity from nuclear power stations built specifically for a part of the interest of the production. And at a cost of about naught point six of a penny per unit. Now the interesting thing is that that is just about the cost of electricity produced in the most modern power station all of which are using conventional fuel. So then you've got the comparison of the cost of nuclear power with the cost of conventional power. But you were really raising another question on top of that you were asking whether the cost of our power produced in nuclear power stations using graphite moderated gas cooled reactors would be are greater or less than the cost of electricity are generated in nuclear

power stations using any of the other types of reactors which Mr. Morris topos was talking about in the early part of this program. Will he answer to these issues that we are quite certain that under our conditions in Great Britain the cold oh whole type of reactor is the right type of reactor for us to use in the initial stages of our program. You always have to remember that the art of the engineer is to use the scientific knowledge the materials of construction and the techniques which are all bailable to him at the time when he is doing his design in order to produce the plant would use most reliable and most economical when James Watt was designing his

steam engines in the latter part of the 18th century. He knew quite certainly that those steam engines were not ideal thermodynamic. What he did was you had to use the materials and the techniques which were available then and it was then that he had to use them because he was building them under 18th century conditions not under 20th century conditions to produce engines which were what the Cornish tin miners wanted to keep their mines dry and he did that and it was his steam engines developed for power production that started Great Britain of in the lead of the industrial revolution. But it was the subsequent developments that kept Great Britain in the lead. Now this is exactly what we mean that in relation to atomic energy we tend to call the whole type of reactor are using the materials the techniques on the

knowledge which is of very low ball now to produce the best reactor that we can build now for use over the next 10 years. I think that we are winning the league over there and of course we are as you probably heard are building a large prototype fast reactor in the north of Scotland on the construction of that is is well in hand and it will go into or operation in early 1958. In the first reactor we use as our fuel either were very highly enriched uranium or alternatively you can use byproduct plutonium as a fuel but you use their virtually pure R material as your fuel and you don't have to slow your neutrons dial you can carry on your chain reaction using fast

neutrons and that is why it's called the Fast Reactor. But it is exactly that which induces so many of your problems are because you are using as your life your sleep you are just on the journey you are using a video expensive NWT fuel and therefore in order to make your reactor commercially practical or you got to get a lot of heat I would of every kilogram of fuel in the reactor. You've got to go to what we call high rating and you are releasing the heat so quickly that you can't possibly use a gas coolant. You got to use a liquid metal as a coolant in order to get your heat away quickly. This gives rise also to your other problems your getting the heat away so quickly that the temperature drop through your fuel element diseased body high on this induces our

very considerable stresses and unless you're careful rather dangerously high temperatures towards the center of the fjord. So then in addition to that you are causing fission was in quite a high proportion of the atoms in your fuel and this tends to disintegrate the fuel. Now he does all these problems which have got to be solved and the dune really reactor is being built to provide us with our operators on a sufficiently large scale to find the solution to these problems. No there is another pretty valuable board. All the fast reactor. Because you haven't got a moderator in the core of the reactor you will have to list six training material which can uselessly absorb neutral and therefore what we call the neutron economy is very much better

now. The number of atoms that we create in the reactor core depends on the number of neutrons that we've got of a little a big calls in the first reactor we can be more economical over on your truck. We are able to or produce atoms than we destroy. In fact while producing heat from a fast reactor which we can convert into electrical power we can also produce more facade items than we start off with. So we are increasing our stock of fuel and it to use for this reason. Let the host react. He very often called a brief general reaction. Not only does it produce electrical power but it breeds fissile material. The difficulties which have to be solved in connection or with a fast

reactor are immense. Well but we are quite satisfied that those difficulties will be solved and the duties won't all the reactor all which will be used industrially in future. Thank you Sir Christopher Hansen for the very enlightening discussion of the present status and future plans of atomic power development in Britain. And that ladies and gentleman winds up this week's program of atoms for power having to do with the international atom items where power was produced by Bob McMahon of already on station WABE a at Purdue University under a grant from the educational radio and television set or recorded interviews in England were made through the courtesy and cooperation of the British Broadcasting Corporation. This transcribed program is distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the me Radio Network.