3.1 Atomic men!

Download this video clip.Video player: ou_futurelearn_nuclear_energy_vid_1053.mp4

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR

Suddenly, science was sexy.

MAN

Morning.

WOMAN

Morning.

MAN

More VIPs?

WOMAN

No. Boffins.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DR BRYON TAYLOR

It was just part of this feeling that science has done great things, can do great things, and will do great things, and we were just part of it.

SCIENTIST

If one of us went to a conference, there might be newspaper headlines - atom man will be there. It was very, very heady.

NARRATOR

More than 5,000 atom men and women landed in a small part of the northwest of England. The locals came up with their own names for the invaders.

NEVILLE RAMSDEN

Probably the favourite was the atomics, to describe to new people in the village.

JOHN HARRIS

I can remember all laughing one morning because of the headline. Britain's Atom Age Heroes. And then you did feel that we were in the vanguard of being something really new.

REPORTER

Men dressed like visitors from Mars add a slightly sinister touch to the hospital atmosphere of the laboratory.

NARRATOR

The local town of Seascale, just a few hundred yards from the site, was becoming Britain's first atomic town.

ROBERTA COOPER

Seascale was an absolutely marvellous place to grow up. It really was. There were golf classes, a riding school, ballroom dancing classes, ballet classes, tea dances, even, in the Windscale Club.

MARGARET DAVIS

All the people were young and ambitious, and there was chemists, there was teachers, there was physicists. There was all kinds of people. People from all over the world. We all got on wonderfully well, and it really was-- it was quite exciting.

NARRATOR

Seascale was called the brainiest town in Britain.

End transcript

Download

 

In the early 1950s, the nuclear industry was very young – the video shows the initial excitement surrounding it; ‘we were in the vanguard of something really new’. People began to talk of an ‘atomic age’.

Windscale was perceived as an exciting and dynamic place. It was located on the Sellafield site in Cumbria (right next to Calder Hall that you looked at last week) and was home to the Windscale Piles which were part of the weapons industry, producing plutonium for nuclear bombs.

In 1957, Windscale experienced a reactor accident that profoundly affected public confidence in the nuclear industry. Other accidents you might have heard of, that involved nuclear power plants (i.e. those designed to generate electricity), include the accident at Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania USA, in 1979 and the accident at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986. The most recent accident occurred in Fukushima, Japan in 2011.

In the next sections, you will examine these accidents and what can go wrong in a nuclear power station.