This thesis examines the Dounreay fast reactor project which became central to the survival of an indigenous nuclear engineering design and construction industry in the UK. Its focus is on the original reactor – DFR – which was given the go-ahead in 1953 and shut down in 1977, based on the premise of a device which could generate electricity whilst creating more fuel than it consumed. That such a device was possible emerged in the early stages of the Manhattan project. However, the British contribution at Los Alamos was almost exclusively on the physics of the atomic bomb, whilst the United States built a substantial industrial infrastructure laying the basis for a nuclear industry. Post war the US refused to share nuclear secrets and when British government decided to push ahead with building its independent atomic arsenal they did so with extremely limited data on the practicalities of handling, manufacturing, and utilising nuclear energy on an industrial scale. This thesis argues that these early beginnings laid down a flawed template for the British nuclear industry in three key areas: 1. The primacy of demand for plutonium for the weapons programme led the UK into a culture of production of the element and reprocessing which made the fast reactor an essential element in the civil programme. 2. The sense of urgency in the Manhattan project followed by the demands of the Cold War led to a culture where research and development ran in tandem with huge construction projects, rather than in measured sequence; leading to a succession of costly and potentially dangerous decisions. 3. The fast reactor was cutting edge; the culture of British engineering was not. It was trapped in Newtonian concepts, struggling to cope with, or often even to acknowledge, unknowns revealed by nuclear physics, leading to a costly and flawed project which consumed – and with decommissioning continues to consume – economic and human resources on a large scale.
The Philosopher's Plutonium Stone: the Dounreay Fast reactor and the fall of Britain's Atomic Empire
MacLeod, D. (Author). 2024
Student thesis: Master's Thesis