Calder Hall, the world’s first industrial scale nuclear reactor to produce electricity on a commercial basis, began operating at what is now Sellafield in the UK on August 20 1956. Of course, producing electricity at Calder Hall was secondary to producing plutonium for the country’s nuclear weapons programme. Nuclear power and weapons have walked hand in hand ever since.

As Stephanie Cooke in her nuclear history, In Mortal Hands, says, Calder Hall was…

…designed and built to produce plutonium for weapons; electricity was only an added extra. ‘We needed the nuclear deterrent and in order to get it you needed the by-product of peaceful nuclear energy,’ said Eric Price… a government energy economist.

[…]

As Price soon realise, the government’s nuclear game plan required economic inventiveness and the perpetration of another myth, that nuclear electricity would prove both less expensive and more reliable than alternative energy sources.

[…]

‘The decisions were not economic. In fact they were far from economic. In fact I would say they were gravely distorted,’ Price said.

In 1956 that alternative energy source was coal. Five decades later the sources have changed to wind, solar and the rest. The economic inventiveness, the perpetration of nuclear myth, and the grave distortions, however, remain the same. From these small beginning in the UK (and the US and Russia), the dirty technology and the equally dirty tactics spread out over the globe.

The decommissioning of Calder Hall is ongoing, dangerous and slow. As Ewan Hutton, a decommissioner at Sellafield says in this video, the reactors were ‘built in a great hurry and they didn’t really think about how we were going to take them apart’.
When it was closed for decommissioning after 47 years in 2003 (its cooling towers were demolished in 2007), Calder Hall was the world’s oldest nuclear reactor.

The same year the UK government published a policy paper describing ‘nuclear power as "economically unattractive", and focussed on the potential for renewable energy.’ And yet, from that forward-looking thinking, the UK government, like others, with their new calls for a nuclear ‘renaissance’ have slipped back. Back to 1956.