March 1963: The Windscale AGR

The Sixties were about to start swinging, Britain was in the middle of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technological revolution, and on the edge of the Lake District, a curious spherical structure had been built at the Windscale nuclear facility. In March 1963, The Engineer was marking the commissioning of a notable part of Britain’s pioneering role in the history of nuclear power: the Windscale Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor, the forerunner for the AGR generation of nuclear power stations. Fifty years later, the WAGR still represents a milestone: it was the first power reactor in the world to be fully decommissioned.

WAGR was designed to test graphite-moderated, CO₂-cooled reactors, which would replace the older Magnox reactors based on the technology developed for nearby Calder Hall, the world’s first operating power reactor (although it had mainly been used to make plutonium for nuclear weapons, and didn’t become a primarily power reactor until 1964). The Engineer’s lengthy feature describes the design of showing the reactor itself — mostly below ground level — and its fuel elements, all enclosed within the aluminium ‘golf ball’ which became an iconic part of the Windscale site, now subsumed within the larger Sellafield complex.