A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954: Gormenghast

 

Just kidding. Today I'm talking about the pioneering nuclear power plant, Calder Hall, not Mervyn Peake's weird 1950 novel about a giant estate that's a country sort-of-thing. (I'd offer a more insightful summary if I'd ever been able to get into the darn thing. Anyway, here's one of Eleanor Morton's bits. The Mervyn Peake reference is a running gag at the end.) I'm just making a witty (YMMV, as the kids say) literary reference. Somewhat surprisingly I find that I'm the first to do it, maybe because all that "Second Elizabethan Age" stuff is down the memory hole. (Hah! Witty literary reference!) 

Calder Hall actually gets its  debut in the 4 June 1954 issue of The Engineer, exactly a month before the Cabinet reluctantly agreed to go ahead with the British hydrogen bomb, in a not-at-all coincidental development. But we don't cover the first two weeks of the month at The Engineer, so we missed it, and also the ominous foreshadowing that is a picture of a Ruston gas turbine set up to burn methane. "The purpose of the demonstration is to show that natural gas, which is available in almost unlimited quantities on many oilfields, can be burnt with the same efficiency and controls as liquid fuels."

The Ruston gas turbine is more of a Titus Alone moment. I know even less about that book than about Gormenghast,, and I think it's safe to say that it will never get a miniseries, so I won't be able to catch up by wathing the TV show, which I will do the moment I finish catching up with my TV-watching backlog. I hear Six Feet Under is good? Per the Wikipedia summary Tuts Alone sounds like it gives some really good grounds for  comparison with the Advanced Gas Reactor and the long slow sunset of the nuclear power industry in the face of the unstoppable rise of the gas peaker, and who cares about global warming and, hey, look, it's the end of days.  

So, yeah, we're not getting the end of the "Titus Cycle" in book form, unless some enterprising agent has added it to Brandon Sanderson's list, and we're not getting the last two finished books as TV shows or movies. But we're certainly getting something equivalent to the tragic consequences of failing to pay for gutter cleaning at Gormenghast, or whatever. 

Calder Hall, which was the first operational commercial atomic power plant in the world, wasn't actually announced on 4 June 1954. That's just its first appearance in the index for 1954. the article is covering the details of its steam plant, which recovered the heat from the carbon dioxide coolant to generate power. Calder Hall was a natural uranium-burning, graphite-moderated, gas-cooled reactor. Because the fuel pellets were inserted in magnesium cases (held shut by Nimonic clasps of a specification that  included cobalt, leading to the production of Cobalt-60, which was an issue at the time. (Heyo!))  By virtue of the cases, Calder Hall-type plants are known as Magnox Reactors, but the key issue is that the use of graphite as a moderator conserves neutrons and allows a natural uranium reactor to produce "weapons-grade" plutonium that contains less than 7% Pu-240 alongside the more stable Pu-239. This entails a "low burnup" in which the fuel pellets aren't exposed to neutron fluxes as long as they can be if a lower grade of plutonium is sought, and this renders the reactors less economical if they have to be taken offline frequently for extended periods of time for refuelling,, which the gas cooling and fuel-handling arrangements are intended to avoid, although carbon dioxide is also a more convenient cooling medium to use with graphite moderators since  graphite and hot water do not mix well.

In practice, refuelling proved to be more difficult than expected, and the Magnox reactors never became competitive with modern coal-fired plants, although this is a somewhat controversial statement from the accounting point of view, because Magnox reactors were also intended to produce plutonium, or, more precisely, neutron flux, which can also be used to produce tritium, another bomb-making component. The "plutonium charge" is not credited to the Magnox reactor ledgers because of national security and all that, but trust us, it makes it all worthwhile, and you can see why this didn't fly! 

So! Bomb-making. Nature left humanity a special surprise in the form of Uranium-235, a very stable nucleoisotope with a half-life of 704 million years that nevertheless gives up a bit less than 3 neutrons for every neutron with which it is bombarded, meaning that sufficiently hot-dense uranium plasma will undergo spontaneous decomposition until the resulting energy flux (203 MeV per atom!) blows the plasma apart. Unfortunately, U-235 makes up a very small portion of natural uranium these days, just 0.72%. Which is really on us as a species for dawdling. Had we  just evolved the need for atom bombs two billion years ago or so, everything would have been so much easier. At least we have a reason to go to EK Draconis. (It looks like we're stuck with young stars if we want Earth-like metallicity and a Solar twin, anyway.) 

Not only did the Valiant dop most of the British hydrogen bombs,
the Valiantski set off the whole panic to begin with!

The easy way to make an atom bomb (or an atom reactor), then, is to get yourself a big pile of Uranium-235, and for that all you need is a not-unreasonably big pile of natural uranium, and a way of sorting out individual atoms by weight, which any high-school physics student will tell you is easy enough, even if the scale of the enterprise suggests expense. As it happens, however, when the United States went into atom-separation in a big way during WWII, when there was money, and, perhaps more importantly, stranded TVA electricity, for everything, they went with gaseous diffusion, which sounds a whole lot more Rube Goldbergish than just whirling the atoms around in a magnetic field or just plain cans. Maybe because it involved working with fluorine? I'm sure there's an explanation at my fingertips, but at this point it is just a historical curiosity. What matters is that in 1954 the United States had a massive uranium-extraction infrastructure chugging along for longue duree substructural reasons that Britain couldn't replicate. 

So what's an Empire to do? Plutonium, which is a byproduct of "burning" uranium in neutron fluxes, is also capable of sustaining a fission chain reaction, and is easily separated from the spent uranium fuel used in atomic plants like Calder Hall by ordinary chemical means. As noted above, the problem is that you don't want to overcook the plutonium or it comes out unstable and your cake tends to fall --I mean, your bomb tends to predetonate. Continuing on the cake theme, Calder Hall was a way to have it, and eat it, too, by getting electrical power out of plutonium production. There was certainly no way, in rolling-brown-outs-Fifties Britain, to lavish electrical power on highly enriched uranium. In a country that still believed in coal shortages, and not the reality of a long sunset for the industry, atomic power was at least a palatable offering on a short list of alternatives that did not yet include North Sea oil and gas. 

As we follow the unfolding of events, we discover that British weaponeers eventually had to put highly enriched uranium into both their atom bombs and their H-bombs, and then the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor, as its  original design proved problematic, and the original beryllium-clad fuel pellets were replaced by steel. I'm not sure why that was a last-minute design change given that beryllium embrittlement was not discovered in the middle of development, as implied on Wikipedia, but was known by 1965 (The Archive for European Integration is "taking too long to respond," but the thumbnail for this 1990 article cites the relevant one from 1965) . I do, however, discover on breezy reading of the abstracts that irradiated beryllium has a tendency to burp tritium. I don't know if that has anything to do with anything, but it is kind of cool, and suggests that Farscape's Rygel might not have been safe to have been around for extended exposures. 

So that's maybe the story of the super-embarrassing Grapple 1 test of May 1957 that was announced as a successful thermonuclear detonation but actually wasn't? They tried to cheap out on expensive fissionables, and oops, it's the Comet all over again? I like the way we arrive at "the hoax . . . was carried out as an act of supreme patriotism by probably no more than a dozen scientists led by Sir William Penney, the director of the nuclear weapons factor at Aldermaston." 

To go on with The Independent a bit further, Churchill's July 1954 direction was a megaton-scale bomb for Blue Steel and blue Streak. The RAF had been working on the assumption that it needed to be able to drop a hundred or so of a total of 300 atom bombs on Russian targets to stop its industry, and war effort, dead. V-bombers were perfectly capable of putting an atom bomb within 300 yards of a dam powerhouse or whatnot, the air marshals said. Going forward a half generation, the standoff cruise missiles had a guidance system consisting of "I hope it knows which way Russia is", so committing to standoff weapons meant committing to megaton-level booms. At the same time, it cut dramatically into the payload available while constraining the weapon dimensionally.  And the ice cream on top was a rising tide of public sentiment in favour of an atmospheric test ban in the wake of the fiasco of CASTLE BRAVO, giving practically no time for testing. So getting it right by the time of the tacked-on 8 November 1957 Grapple X test was an amazing engineering accomplishment, but it did involve the use of a "composite uranium-235 and plutonium" primary core. There is no hint of how much highly enriched uranium was involved, but Britain and the United States commenced trading plutonium for HEU directly afterwards and continued through the 1960s. So Calder Hall was a rational answer to a problem that was overtaken by . . . something.

 Because it beat the alternative?

Gormenghast. It's a good metaphor. I blame the Tories.