THE NORTHERN ADVOCATE Registered for transmission the the Post Newspaper saturday' AUGUST 30, 1947. Britain Harnesses Nuclear Energy

Northern Advocate, 30 August 1947, Page 4

THE NORTHERN ADVOCATE Registered for transmission the the Post Newspaper saturday ' AUGUST 30, 1947. Britain Harnesses Nuclear Energy

From lime to time during recent months, stories, alternately denied and reaffirmed, have suggested that Britain was building a big atomic power plant at Didcot. Today's cable news seems to indicate that once again British scientists and engineers have not been as inactive as silence regarding their work has implied, for Professor J. D. Cockcroft, chief of the Didcot plant, told a conference of the British Association that continuous atomic energy was released for the first time in Britain on August 15, when a chain reaction of splitting uranium atoms was established at the Didcot laboratories.

The professor explained that the machine, which took a year to build, and the cost of which, according to earlier estimates, probably ran into some millions sterling, produces enough energy to supply a block of fiats with light and power. This statement will doubtless give greater intensity to the contehtion that what we have to face today is the practical issue of what to do with our possession of the key to the vast store of energy put into the atom when it was created As the Round Table for June points out, this discovery, like so many other discoveries, has two sides: the military, of which we know a good deal, and the civil, of which at present we know much less, though the Didcot achievement indicates that mere is known than has been suspected.

The danger of the military application of the discovery is extreme, but it is agreed that the benefits in the civil sphere may be even more important, though before reaping these benefits we must learn to curb the risks.

This calls for some form of international regulation, and on this the United Nations has been earnestly seeking a plan which, while effective in purpose, shall interfere no more than need be with national sovereignty, and thus be acceptable to all.

The Round Table admits that the use of some form of nuclear fuel to supplement the use of coal, and ultimately, perhaps, to replace it, might well prove a godsend to many countries, and not least Britain; but it holds that we dare not so employ it if it inevitably involved the distribution throughout the world of the most dangerously explosive and radio-active material known to man. Of its dangerous possibilities we have reason to be fully aware; of its utility as a coming fuel, once certain technical points are straightened out, we are in doubt only as to its cost in comparison with that of coal (or hydro-electricity) though fore-

casts have been made which show that the costs would be about equal if the local price of coal were ten dollars a ton.

The writer in the Round Table regards this as a distinctly encouraging prospect, and adds: “There are indeed hopes that a first power station, designed to make use of atomic energy, may be working before the end of 1948.”

This achievement, which evidently had special reference to activities in the United States, would seem to have been anticipated by Britain s feat at Didcot.

While this may give pleasure to British people, the fact that nuclear fuel has been put to practical test gives added interest to efforts -which have been made to ensure that the energy is not put to destructive use. A board of consultants, headed by Dr Lilienthal, who were called in to advise the State Department in Washington on security questions in the field of atomic energy made the striking suggestion that it might be advisable to “denature” nuclear fuel before it was sold—much as alcohol is denatured to convert it into unpalatable methylated spirits—and so render it “safe,” or at “safer.”

The consultants explained that, as is now generally known, the explosive used in an atomic bomb is an exceedingly pure form of either U. 235 or plutonium, and it is these very substances, though not in so puie a form, that are needed for the nuclear furnaces to produce power for civil ends.

That the coincidence is unfortunate is agreed, but it does suggest the possible loophole of issuing the new fuel in a form sufficiently “impure” to make it unsuitable for military use though suitable for civil purposes.

The State Department recognises that to issue fuel thus denatured in place of pure U. 235 or plutonium cannot be looked upon as an absolutely watertight precaution, and opinions differ as to its merits, but it is nevertheless a plan which would make discovery of evasion a great deal easier for the Atomic Energy Agency staff proposed to be set up. If the furnaces to take the nuclear fuel had all to be of AEA design the chance of any trick by which they could be induced to produce a secret supply of pure plutonium would be greatly decreased.

Britain’s Didcot achievement must necessarily spur the nations to find a means whereby international cooperation may be observed in the harnessing of a monster which, uncontrolled, would make the accepted conception of a Frankenstein poor and puny.