History of Imperial College London

Read the fourth of our excerpts from Dr Hannah Gay's new book - the first major history of Imperial College London

Dr Hannah Gay's book The History of Imperial College London 1907-2007: Higher Education and Research in Science, Technology and Medicine is the first major history of the College to be published, telling the story of a new type of institution. We are whetting your appetite by publishing excerpts from Dr Gay's book throughout 2007.

Alumni can purchase copies of the book online from Imperial College Press books at www.worldscibooks.com/histsci/p478.html, where if you enter discount code P478 when ordering, you will receive a 20 per cent discount on the book price. You can also purchase copies of the book from the Union Shop on the Sherfield Walkway, South Kensington Campus.

A nuclear reactor for post-war Imperial

After the war there was willingness on the part of the government to spend more on universities and to see them expand. As Patrick Linstead put it in 1957, “a highly technical war gave place to a highly competitive peace, in which the standard of living and the sustainability of the currency could only be maintained by greater technological efficiency. Thus, perhaps the most important of the subsequent major innovations at the College were the reintroduction of biochemistry, the introduction of nuclear science and engineering, and of computing and control.

Linstead was especially keen on a nuclear future for the College. He invited Sir John Cockcroft [Winner of Nobel Prize in Physics 1951] to be the special visitor at the 1956 Commemoration Day, and Cockcroft gave a special speech extolling the glorious future of atomic energy. “Calder Hall [nuclear power station at Sellafield] is only the beginning,” he told the graduating students at that, by the time most of them were forty years old, the energy supply of the United Kingdom would be almost completely nuclear. Linstead appears to have shared this view and more than once repeated Cockcroft’s 1958 claim that in four years time nuclear energy would be as cheap as that derived from coal.

In the late 1950s there was much discussion as to whether universi¬ties should have nuclear reactors for research purposes. Aside from safety, one argument against such a move was that the kind of simple reactors one might build for universities were not likely to be anything like the ones that nuclear engineers would encounter in the larger world.

J.M. Kay, Chair of Nuclear Power in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, desperately wanted a research reactor for Imperial. He submitted plans which various government committees simply sat on and, in 1960, he wrote to The Times stating that the delay made him 'frustrated beyond words'. But other universities were jumping on the bandwagon. Thus deciding where, if anywhere, academic nuclear reactors were to be sited was a major problem for the government.

In the end it looked likely that one would be built for the University of London but whether it would be Kay's design, or that of its Queen Mary College rival, was not clear. As an editorial in Nuclear Engineering rather awkwardly put it “if the negotiations over the University of London reactor were to be used as the plot of a play, film or even comic opera it is doubtful that the critics could forbear the use of a few sarcastic comments ... [on] the tortuousness of [the] theme and ... overall lack of realism.”

The DSIR committee looking into the designs preferred the one proposed by Queen Mary College, but politics intervened and Imperial College was given the go-ahead to construct its 100kW Consort Reactor. The reactor was built at Silwood Park by the General Electric Company and came into operation in 1965. It was used for research in nuclear science and technology, reactor engineering, neutron physics, and solid state physics. In 1971 the addition of radiochemical and physical laboratories broadened the areas of research.

Text taken from chapter nine: Expansion - Post-war to Robbins, 1945-67 (Part one)

Reproduced with the kind permission of author Dr Hannah Gay
Copyright © 2007 by Imperial College Press