The British Production Piles

The two piles at Windscale were originally known as the British Production Piles in official documents — Production referring to the production of plutonium. Later, of course, they were simply referred to as the Windscale piles. 

The idea of building atomic piles in Britain to produce plutonium had been in the minds of the scientific team working in America even before the war was over. In his memoir, Cockcroft mentions the delay caused by the General Election of 1945 (Attlee had not been aware of the atomic programme) and goes on to say  

It was decided that a technical committee should continue in being and it met on 11 September [1945]. Oliphant made an impassioned plea that a very strongly worded resolution should be sent to the advisory committee calling for an immediate decision to go ahead with... a 1,000 kilowatt pile and for immediate steps to be taken to set up production of U235 and PU239... 

The decision to build piles to produce plutonium was referred to indirectly in a statement which Attlee made in the House of Commons on 8 October 1946. The purpose of producing plutonium was referred to rather coyly as for other purposes . 

The Americans had built piles to produce plutonium on the Columbia River at Hanford, Washington in 1943. These were water-cooled, with around 110,000 litres of water being pumped through the pile each minute. A supply of water with very little in the way of impurities was essential to prevent the fuel cartridges from corroding. The problem with trying to build a similar plant in Britain was that there were very few places which had a sufficient supply of water of the required purity. One possibility was to build the plant overseas, and Canada was considered a strong 

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EVALUATION OF GRAPHITE SAFETY ISSUES FOR THE BRITISH PRODUCTION PILES AT WINDSCALE ... 

Marsden B.J.. Preston S.D., Wickham A.J. and Tyson A.. "Evaluation of Graphite Safet - Issues for the British Production Piles at Windscale Graphite Sampling in Preparation for the Dismantling of Pile 1 and the Further Safestorage of Pile 2 paper in this volume. 1997... 

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