The second head of Britain’s reactor production organization, Risley, was Len Owen, who had been the valued but often argumentative deputy to Christopher Hinton. Hinton exited the field in August 1957 and that month Owen chaired what was called the Production Executive Committee, a large meeting that regularly went over the nuts and bolts of ongoing work. My attention was caught by the following paragraph regarding the Dounreay Fast Reactor, a modestly sized (11 MWe) experimental foray into breeder reactors. By the time of this meeting, DFR had been under construction for three and a half years.
On the fast reactor the main problem is that the safety device cannot be guaranteed under all conditions because of the risk of uranium solidifying in the core; Aldermaston are calculating the maximum explosion which the sphere can withstand without fragmentation. Sir Leonard Owen said that a full examination of the possibility and size of explosion is being made and that he expected that it would be less than the sphere can contain. If the experimental programme is limited to working below 5 MW for the first two years he did not expect serious trouble. He felt that the core design was bad, though not on account of the safety aspect, and a new design should be given urgent consideration. He had said, with Professor Skinner’s agreement, that the engineering design should not be ruined by imaginary difficulties. He was sure that some of the dangers being forecast are mutually contradictory.
Production Executive Committee. 1957. PEC meeting 130, Aug. 13, 1957 minutes. AB 9/370. National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
DFR eventually came to life just over a year later. Nothing tells me that its core was ever revised, so what was Owen’s remark all about? He was a bluff Yorkshireman, opinionated and grumpy, so perhaps this paragraph was just an unimportant grizzle captured in by a zealous minute taker? I’ll never know.
