Economics of Atomic Energy. The Atoms for Peace Series

191 Pages·1957·3.033 MB·English

by  Mary Goldring and D. Wragge Morley (Auth.)

The Atoms for Peace Series
General Editor
D. WRAGGE MORLEY
Atomic Energy in Agriculture
Atomic Energy in Medicine
Economics of Atomic Energy
Economics
of
Atomic Energy
MARY GOLDRING, B.A.
LONDON
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1957
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FOREWORD
PROBABLY the greatest single event of this century is the fact
that nuclear power has become economic, and electricity will
be produced at a cost equivalent to that from ordinary coal
and oil-fired power stations within the next three or four
years. Indeed, by 1962 there can be no doubt that nuclear
power will be generating electricity more cheaply than coal
or oil. The future trend from that date onwards will
undoubtedly be for cheaper and cheaper electricity from
nuclear power and more and more expensive coal and
probably also oil.
Britain has already played a historic role in the develop-
ment of nuclear power as an industrial force. British people
have no doubt that their country will continue to be in the
vanguard of nuclear power development.
The United States and Russia are, however, already
providing competition and are likely to be joined within the
next decade by Germany and Japan as competitors to the
British lead, and perhaps by yet other countries, or by groups
of countries similar to those who have joined together to
form Euratom.
Miss Golding discusses critically the growth of Britain's
nuclear power from the viewpoint of one who is well
informed, yet outside and therefore free from the trammels
imposed by either membership of the U.K. Atomic Energy
Authority or the companies.
Her contribution to the history of this important theme of
modern industrial history and the discussion of its likely
future implications is of necessity personal. At the same time
this volume endeavours to outline clearly and authoritatively
the major trends of a subject which is inevitably, because of
its youth and rapid growth, subjected to more rapid shifts of
opinion and fact than practically any other sphere of economics.
London. DEREK WRAGGE MORLEY.
March, 1957.
The drawings in Chapter 2 are
based on diagrams that have appeared in
The Economist,
PARTI THE ATOMIC INDUSTRY
CHAPTER 1
THE ATOMIC FACTORIES
THE night train from Euston gets into Seascale station just
before breakfast. The station is not much more than a
waiting room, a signal box and a steep path to the hotel. For
a moment, the express shuts out the grey view of the Irish
Sea, reaching up across a shingle beach to the edge of the track,
then a handful of passengers get down and the train is gone,
a cataract of bright, warm noise, a transitory disturbance in
the sea-mist quiet of the Cumberland coast.
The factory is out of sight of the station, behind the hill
but near enough to the shore for its effluent pipes to run down
and into the sea. It is marked by two immense white chim-
neys and a number of white square buildings standing like
monstrous sugar cubes in a pattern of roadways and grass-
verged flower beds. In a slight hollow, another very similar
site is under construction; some of its cube-like buildings are
finished and the scaffolding is off their sides, while others are
no higher than their foundations. When the sun comes out,
it strikes the buildings, white and sparkling; the windows that
run in continuous bands round each floor take on a clear
aquamarine light and the factory, set in the dark green
meadows that reach up to the perimeter fence, is as vivid and
beautiful, and as serenely proportioned, as a modern Acropolis.
Something of the sense of time undisturbed that gives
Seascale station its special tranquillity also clings around the
factory. It takes a moment to analyse just why its buildings
should look more like something from a past civilization than
plants dedicated to the newest of all sources of power and
destruction. The clue lies in the absence of any visible move-
ment, or of any sign of activity beyond the machines on the
building site. There is no smoke from any of the chimneys;
there is never any smoke from them and the sea birds perch
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THE ATOMIC INDUSTRY
on them all day long. Nothing ever seems to come in or
go out of the plant; there are no lorries bringing in raw
materials and taking away loads of finished product, no
bustling railway sidings and shunting engines linking the
factory with the main line track at Seascale. Nothing ever
seems to happen. There are no sounds of machinery, no
conveyor belts, no networks of pipes and pumps and gauges;
only silent concrete walls within walls, with a few thin pipes
protruding; silent panels of instruments registering no apparent
movement, a huge trough of still water, the size and twice
the depth of a swimming pool, with a rail along its bottom,
and a few quiet men doing nothing. Recognizable life
only begins in the laboratories, which are not in any way
concerned with the main process. Here are men and women
analysing and testing samples taken from the plant; warning
red lights over doors and large-lettered notices about author-
ized personnel that give a visitor a tingle of trespass. This
is about the only place where the cluck-cluck-clucking of
geiger counters can be heard.
This factory, beautiful, isolated and immensely valuable,
is the Windscale works of the Atomic Energy Authority; its
responsibility is to produce plutonium for weapon production.
This it does in two atomic reactors, processing the plutonium
in two ancillary chemical plants that present the same blind
concrete face to their attendants as the piles themselves.
The site under development is the atomic power station at
Calder Hall; the Calder stream runs between the two sites.
The Calder piles also produce plutonium which the chemical
plants at Windscale will process. So there is in fact pro-
duction at Windscale. Operations are being carried out
there in the presence of great heat and lethal radioactivity.
Physical processes that involve the breaking apart of the atom
are taking place inside those concrete catacombs day and
night uninterruptedly. The tranquillity outside is so great
compared with the violence of the reactions inside that it is
occasionally difficult to appreciate that anything is happening
at all.
Trade and industry have been built up on communications.
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THE ATOMIC FACTORIES
The outward signs of industrial growth are tankers in the
docks and wagons on the railways; sidings with coal dumps
by the factory walls and congested lorries on the Great North
Road. The occasional lorry that slips out of Sellafield with
its load of plutonium goes unnoticed. Atomic products
are small in bulk: they do not need vast networks of trunk
roads or ocean-going tankers to carry them. Their factories
do not scar the countryside with railway tracks or darken the
air with smoke. The Windscale works have brought employ-
ment to the west coast of Cumberland, with a hurriedly-built
outcrop of houses for the new workers, but they have brought
none of the outward symptoms of industrial progress, the
roads, the railways, the noise and the smoke.
If this is a new industry, its cleanness, its silence and sheer
beauty are all a great advance on anything we have known
before. Windscale and Calder are a vast improvement on
the Rhondda valley. But these plants cannot be built in
isolation: they are part of a complex of factories that stretch
right back to the mines of the Congo and South Africa.
They may need little to support them in the way of roads or
communications, they may take little from the countryside
in which they are built, but they take great toll of a country's
wealth and the skill of its man-power. Each plant costs
millions of pounds to erect and the best brains to design it.
And not one plant, but the whole complex, must be built
and brought into full operation before a country can expect
one penny return, or one kilowatt of energy from its atomic
investment.
These are nothing more or less than the raw materials
factories of the atomic industry, concerned entirely with
producing materials that can undergo atomic fission. The
process starts with the mining of uranium and continues
from there through a sequence of operations that grow
steadily more fantastic and expensive. These factories and
others like them have been operating in the U.S.A. since the
early years of the war, in Britain and Russia since the late
1940s and in France since the mid-1950s. Their commis-
sioning is a major industrial undertaking but, largely because
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THE ATOMIC INDUSTRY
of the isolation of the plants and the secrecy that surrounds
them, there is a popular tendency to think of them as not
much more than over-sized laboratories. This sometimes
leads to the belief that the development of peaceful atomic
energy involves nothing more complicated than the building
of atomic power stations, and from there it is easy to slip
into a serious underestimation of what atomic energy requires
in terms of capital invested and skilled man-power.
When Sir Christopher Hinton, who is the leading atomic
engineer in Britain, told the United Nations conference on
atomic energy held in Geneva in 1955 that, in his view,
atomic energy was not for the undeveloped countries, he
startled many of the delegates and offended not a few. But
he was only saying in blunt terms what most scientists know
already: that atomic energy is no genie with a lamp but a
new branch of engineering on which a new industry is being
built. It is an exceedingly difficult technique to learn; it can
be grasped only by a country that is already in a high stage
of industrial development, and developed by one with a
national income that is already big enough to accommodate
the heavy capital investment required for even the early
growth stages of an atomic industry—which is all that Britain
has at present for an annual expenditure that must be running
at over £100 million a year.
Supplies of uranium
The first step must always be to make sure of supplies of
uranium. Uranium is a metal, green in colour and rather
unpleasant to handle, and it is the only element that yields
fissile materials. In time, it will be possible to produce
these from another element, thorium, but even this process
requires the agency of uranium, or a uranium-derived product
to trigger it off. Geologists like to describe uranium as a
plentiful metal (they say that there are four grams of uranium
in every ton of matter), but it tends to be thinly distributed
over the world's surface, which makes collection difficult.
Heavy concentrations of uranium, the kind that lend them-
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THE ATOMIC FACTORIES
selves to economical mining, are relatively few and far
between.
The biggest deposits of this kind are in Czechoslovakia,
the Belgian Congo, Canada, South Africa and Australia.
Uranium had so little commercial value before the war
that prospectors had no incentive to look for it, and there
may, for all anyone knows, be vast riches of uranium still
undiscovered. The oldest of the known deposits are the
Joachimsthal mines in Czechoslovakia, which have been mined
for centuries for a variety of minerals, from lead to silver and
cobalt. Authors were already discussing advances in
mechanization at Joachmisthal in the early 1500s. The mines
were the principal pre-war source of uranium, when it was
used only as a colouring material. Many experts believe that
they must be approaching exhaustion and may have been
replaced as a source of uranium for Russia by mines further
east.
The Shinkolobwe mines in the Belgian Congo were worked
for radium until 1936, and re-opened after the war as uranium
mines. Then they were the western countries' only large
source of uranium, and while scientists complain about the
qualities of Congo ore, they have been glad enough of Belgian
supplies while there were no other.
The other large deposits are all post-war discoveries, the
fruits of the new 'gold rush'. In Canada, they spread around
Lake Athabaska, in one of the more inaccessible parts of
Saskatchewan; and in even more remote sites on the east
shore of the Great Bear Lake, 20 miles from the Arctic circle.
In Australia big deposits have been found in Radium Hill in
the south and even larger ones in the humid scrub-lands of
Rum Jungle in the north. The South African uranium is at
least within reach of communications, as the deposits stretch
right across the gold reefs; but against this, the ore is poor
and would not be worth mining for itself alone. The South
African uranium industry is based on mining for gold and
extracting the uranium as a by-product from the waste slurry
left after the gold has been removed. Some of the mines
have accumulated * residual slime dams ' —the equivalent
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