Calder Hall nuclear reactor

Uranium is almost entirely used for energy production in nuclear power plants. The commercial nuclear era began with graphite-moderated reactors. The first plant for production of electricity (5 MW) was built at Obninsk near Moscow. In England, at Calder Hall, four reactors of this type, each with a power of 45 MW, were built in 1956. The Chernobyl reactors also were graphite-moderated. 

Hinton, Sir C., The place of the Calder Hall type of reactor in nuclear power generation, J. Brit. Nucl. Energy Conf, 1957, 2, 43 46. 

Calder Hall power station in Cumbria, UK, on the site of the present-day nuclear power complex at Sellafield (Figure 6.11), opened in 1956 and was the first nuclear reactor in the world to produce electricity on an industrial scale. 

British Nuclear Fuels pic (BNFL) provide a complete nuclear fuel cycle service with its sites at Springfields (AGR/Magnox Fuel Fabrication) near Preston and Sellafield (MOX Fuel Fabrication and Reprocessing) in Cumbria. BNFL also generates electricity using Magnox Reactors at Sellafield (Calder Hall) and Chaplecross in Scotland. This paper provides an overview of the Windscale Vitrification Plant (WVP) and reviews the major safety issues associated with vitrification operations. The practicalities of vitrification of Pu using the current WVP process are briefly discussed. 

The first RBMK-type reactor started up at Obninsk in 1954—two years before Calder Hall. It is still operating. There are plans for 70000 MW of new nuclear plant to be commissioned between 1984 and 1994 but how that target will be affected by the decision to build no more RBMK reactors is not clear. 

As mentioned earlier, the first LWR in Japan was the JAERIJPDR which started operating in 1963. The reactor is of the plate construction type and the material was SA302B modified. The first commercial nuclear power plant was JAPCO s Tokai 1 which went into operation in 1966. The RPV was the Calder Hall-type made of JIS SB46 modified (Coltuf 26 equivalent) plate steel. After that, JAPCO constructed the Tsuruga 1 BWR plant in 1965. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO) also decided to construct the Fukushima 1... 

Calder Hall was the world s first purpose built commercial nuclear power station and was the first of a series of gas-cooled nuclear reactors of entirely British design. The last of these, at Tomess, was completed in 1988. Many other reactors were built in Britain during the same period — some for research and some as prototypes. In the 1950s, Harwell became an internationally renowned centre of research into atomic energy. 

There are problems with the design of a fast reactor. The first is that the nuclear cross-section of uranium 235 — that is, the apparent size of the nucleus — appears to be smaller than a fast neutron compared with a slow one, and hence there needs to be more fissile material in the reactor. Unlike a thermal reactor, such as Calder Hall or the magnox reactors, a fast reactor cannot be built using natural uranium, but needs highly emiched uranium 235 or plutonium as fuels. 

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