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History featuresYou are in: Cumbria > History > History features > Calder Hall 50 years on … Calder Hall 50 years on …By Adrian Pitches, BBC Environment Correspondent On 17 October 1956 the Queen pressed the switch that diverted electricity from the world’s first nuclear power station, Calder Hall, into the National Grid.  The Sellafield skyline Calder Hall was a marvel of British engineering. It was constructed using machine tools developed for aeroplanes and tanks during the Second World War. Long before computer-aided design and manufacture, Calder Hall’s engineers built a nuclear reactor whose constituent parts barely differed by the thickness of a human hair. Richard Hardiman’s father was one of those engineers and Richard remembers the reactor pressure vessels being driven through Egremont on the back of Pickford’s lorries.  Richard Hardiman Richard was one of the schoolchildren who greeted the Queen as the Royal Train drew into Sellafield station. Marjorie Taylor also had the day off school. She was at Calder Hall standing for hours shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of onlookers in Enclosure A. She still has the invitation today. Ernest Taylor (no relation) worked on the construction site at Calder Hall. He’d travelled across from Northern Ireland in search of work and still has his Ulster accent 50 years after moving to Cumbria. He remembers coating the inside of the cooling towers.  Ernest Taylor In 1956 Britain’s first “atomic power station” was celebrated. In 1986 the Chernobyl disaster tarnished the image of nuclear power. And in 2006, despite a new Government commitment to build new nuclear stations, nuclear power remains a controversial subject. In a more innocent age half a century ago the official programme on 17 October 1956 stated: “Calder Hall was built as a requirement for more military plutonium and as an experiment to investigate the possibilities of adapting nuclear energy to the production of electrical power quickly, cheaply and safely.”  Ticket to the opening of Calder Hall In other words, the power station was needed to fuel our nuclear weapons programme and electricity was a useful byproduct. Half a century later we’re still grappling with the realities of nuclear power, nuclear waste and nuclear proliferation. But West Cumbria needs a new nuclear age over the next half century to provide the jobs that have been guaranteed by Calder Hall and Sellafield over the past 50 years. last updated: 13/05/2008 at 14:07 You are in: Cumbria > History > History features > Calder Hall 50 years on … 
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