Last updated 11:58, Tuesday, 18 March 2008

THE days when postwar machine tools, some of them rescued from scrapheaps, were used to make painstakingly accurate parts for the world’s first nuclear power station have been recalled by a former Sellafield shift team leader.

Richard Hardiman spoke out at a recent NDA meeting to suggest more should be done to mark and honour those pioneering days at Sellafield.

“There should be some form of memorial or recognition of the thousands who came here and worked alongside Cumbrians in the pioneering days of nuclear power,” he said.

Richard speaking from his home overlooking the River Ehen at Cleator, recalls being told by his late father, George, of how the graphite workshops at Sellafield had to cut the 58,000 giant blocks needed to create the first nuclear reactors at Calder Hall.

“In the machine shops after 1947, the machine tools they had to work with had come from the wartime production of tanks and some even had to be rescued from scrapheaps, such was the shortage of tools. Yet those men had to work to tolerances of two thousands of an inch, equal to a human hair’s breadth.

“And at the final assembly of the reactor blocks to a height of 27ft the reactor was just 3/16th out of true from top to bottom.”

He says many of the graphite workers were ex-miners and “my father recalled to me that the blocks of graphite looked like black coffins and brought tears to the eyes of one worker who had seen the coffins being brought up just a year earlier from the William Pit.”

Richard says he does not want to see the NDA merely ‘clean up’ the sites and all the struggles of those early years be forgotten. He has retained the letter sent out to his father and other employees from the then prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden. The prime minister wrote: “Of all the events which have taken place in this year 1956, history may remember longest the day when Calder Hall began to feed electricity into the national grid network.

“This will be a memorable day in man’s forward march. The outcome of ten year’s sustained work by British scientists and engineers. We have made a splendid start and I am confident that we will not fail behind in the race in which we are engaged.”

He recalls as a schoolboy how all the children from Thornhill and Egremont got on the train to Sellafield on October 17 1956 to wave union flags as Queen Elizabeth switched on Calder Hall.

It is this pride in the birth of Britain’s nuclear power industry that Richard thinks should be marked.

Richard’s father came from Harwell, as did many of the hurriedly-recruited technicians. He became the foreman in the graphite machining shop at Sellafield.

The family were first accommodated in post-war prefabs at Dent View, Thornhill. These were the prefabricated homes, complete with fridges and appliances that were built in factories to help out with families blitzed out of their homes by German bombers. Even more basic accommodation was also used: former prisoner of war wooden huts near to the then Rowntrees chocolate factory in Egremont.

One idea Richard had as a memorial to the Cumbrian nuclear pioneers was that part of Calder Hall should be preserved in some form. The cooling towers have already been blasted to oblivion, but the long-term fate of the actual reactor cores will keep the NDA experts occupied for years to come.

Richard recalls an interesting social divide in the early days. “They created the Windscale Club at Seascale, but that tended to be more for the scientists and white collar staff, meanwhile the Calder Club was built at Mirehouse and that was catering more for the shopfloor blue collar workers.”

These recollections and many others of the way a former mining area of West Cumbria became the heart of the nation’s newest and most promising technological ‘new era’ are among those that Richard feels should be preserved.

Many of his sentiments are shared by Seascale’s own archeologist Professor Clifford Jones, an authority on the history of Calder Hall as he also worked at the station himself before becoming professor at Lancaster University.

He writes: “With 19 other publicly owned nuclear sites, Calder Hall was passed to the NDA in April 2007. The plan is to cocoon the four reactors in concrete, and demolish the rest.

“She was a very tidy old ship, internally quite magnificent, with brass fittings and dials, all set in a Dan Dare future.”

He has asked English Heritage to list it as a historic structure, seeking preservation of parts “to provide for the future a reasonable representation of the world’s first Magnox power station, a reactor, a heat exchanger building, a cooling tower and a turbine hall”. If it is not saved, he says, in five years no Magnox power stations will survive.

Professor Jones contended the Calder site could be made radiologically safe – “school parties could walk over the preserved reactor”. He added: “ People thought it (Calder Hall) would give un-metered electricity. It was a huge leap forward. Now they’re going to rip it all to pieces.”