COVER STORY Nuclear evolution
When the first edition of Nuclear Engineering International was published, in April 1956, the nuclear industry was still in its infancy. How have attitudes, perceptions and performance shifted over the intervening years?
By Professor Adrian Bull, BNFL Chair in Nuclear Energy and Society, Dalton Nuclear Institute, The University of Manchester and President of The Nuclear Institute
LOOKING BACK AT THE FIRST ISSUE of NEi it’s instructive to consider how much things have changed – and yet, in some ways, how some things remain unaltered. The changes are more obvious. Black and white
photographs (or those suggesting some artificial colouration). A contents page which lists the titles of articles in French, German and Spanish – as well as English! Small text in large blocks. Initial and surname used to identify most of the authors (although if you’re a “Sir” you get your full name!). Even the currency of the price harks back to many decades ago. But look beyond the magazine itself, and we can also see huge changes in our industry between 1956 and today.
The first edition of Nuclear Engineering International was priced at 3 shillings and sixpence. Source: Nuclear Engineering International
Governance Perhaps one of the most fundamental is that the UK nuclear industry of the 1950s was owned and operated directly by government agencies. The UK Atomic Energy Authority and the Central Electricity Authority (which became the Central Electricity Generating Board in 1958) were there to implement government directives over power generating infrastructure in England and Wales. Scotland had its own parallel bodies to the CEA/CEGB. When government ministers decided that more nuclear plants were a good idea, these bodies received the instructions and the funding to make such plants a reality. Just like that. There was no disconnect, as we have today, between policy and action.
In the nuclear world of 2026, Government policymaking isn’t enough to drive construction. The expectation is that nuclear plants will be delivered by the commercial utilities which filled the gap left by the CEGB when electricity was privatised. And that means that those
44 | April 2026 |
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plants need to be funded by those utilities, either with their own money – or by bringing in investment partners. With nuclear plants costing tens of billions of pounds, and taking a decade or more to build, the impact of this change cannot be overstated. Traditionally only bodies with the financial strength and stability of a government behind them have been able to take such massive, long-term investments. And indeed that’s proved to be the case. Our current new build projects are still essentially being funded by governments. Just not always our own. Hinkley Point C is being developed by EDF (owned by the French government) in partnership with Chinese government agency CGN. Sizewell C is now being majority funded by our own government with EDF as a shareholder. And the SMR programme will also have substantial UK Government funding through Great British Energy – Nuclear. We still appear to be a long way from a scenario where commercial entities might be the sole investors in a UK nuclear power project.
Leadership The leaders of our post-war nuclear industry were the scientists and engineers who had pioneered and implemented some of the big developments in nuclear technology up to that point. Whilst it’s always good to see top professionals rising up the career ladder, the mindset of those leading innovators wasn’t always suited to running businesses to the same extent that it was perfect for solving technical challenges. With almost unlimited government funding available, and
a drive for Britain to further cement its place as a global leader in all things scientific after the war, the temptation facing these men – and it was always men – was to build all of the learning and insight gleaned from one project into the next one. So each power station was different from the ones which had gone before. Each was intended to be “the one” which would become the gold standard. And the rest of the world would be lining up to buy the technology from us. Until the industry boffins learned more from that one, and decided they could do better. The result was a series of reactor designs, almost all unique in the world. Ironically only the first two Magnox designs were very similar, Calder Hall and Chapelcross, although they were built in parallel with one another, so there was no opportunity to benefit from the lessons of construction. Operationally though, a collection of different designs poses challenges for the owners of those plants. Maintenance is difficult, as each design will have its own issues, and securing replacements for critical components is costly and time-consuming. Other nations took a different approach. Exemplified in the extreme by the French who built 32 of the same design in the biggest rollout of standardised
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