The launch of the Calder Hall nuclear power station on October 17, 1956, is a big, big deal in the history I’m telling. It was modest in size (60 MWe, what venture capitalists are now spruiking as Small Modular Reactors), it was suboptimal because it was partly designed to produce military plutonium (which never, in the event, proved necessary), but it was a huge deal. The Queen, two years in the job, came to christen it. In my book, I deal with her speech and that of Edwin Plowden, the civil servant overseeing all things nuclear, but it’s also worth seeing bits of the speech of the Lord President of the Council, then also the Leader of the House of Lords, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil. I know nothing of him and indeed, during my research, often found myself confused because he’s referred to as “Lord Salisbury” or “Salisbury” because he also happened to be the 5th Marquess of Salisbury. On that sunny day in green Cumbria, Salisbury made the first speech before Plowden and Queen Elizabeth:
This is a unique occasion. In years to come many atomic power stations will be built in this country and overseas. But to Calder Hall will always belong the distinction of having been the first station anywhere in the world to produce electricity from atomic energy on a truly industrial scale. It is therefore a matter of great gratification to me and to all members of Her Majesty’s Government that this historic occasion should be honoured by the presence of Your Majesty, who has graciously consented to perform the opening ceremony
He spoke simplistically about nations’ needs for energy, the small number of “wasting” natural assets used for energy production, and the need to discover new sources of energy.
The ‘meaning’ of Calder Hall is that such an addition has been made. This power station shows in practical terms that electricity for use in homes and factories can be produced by burning uranium in nuclear reactors.
Of course he laid down thickly the rhetoric of Britain revisiting its glorious industrial past, how it planned to build a dozen nuclear power plants by 1965. He closed with a pleasingly (in my view) bland, direct view:
It is an ambitious programme. We are satisfied that, in Calder Hall, we have begun well.
United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. 1956. Script for Calder Hall brochure. AB 19/97. National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
