An atomic empire: a technical history of the rise and fall of the British atomic energy programme

Britain was the first country to exploit atomic energy on a large scale, and at its peak in the mid-1960s, it had generated more electricity from nuclear power than the rest of the world combined.The civil atomic energy programme grew out of the military programme which produced plutonium for atomic weapons. In 1956, Calder Hall power station was opened by the Queen. The very next year, one of the early Windscale reactors caught fire and the world's first major nuclear accident occurred.The civil programme ran into further difficulty in the mid-1960s and as a consequence of procrastination in