Is a genuinely uranium-powered future feasible? What unpicking the atomic mindset can do for us

On 17 October 1956, a significant milestone was marked for both the newly established nuclear industry and for British national pride. At 12.16pm, in the presence of numerous dignitaries and the press, Queen Elizabeth II ceremonially pulled a lever, initiating the flow of electricity from the Calder Hall Nuclear Power Station in Cumbria to the National Grid. Subsequently, Workington, 15 miles up the coast became the first town in the world to be powered by nuclear energy.

The Daily Express reported on this development breathlessly: ‘A-Power: It’s Here! In Action! The First Dinners are Cooked!’ The excitement spawned by this advancement was not just around the technology’s electricity-generating potential but for Britain’s standing on the world stage, something that had taken a serious battering in recent years.

Another publication reported: “By the simple act of setting in motion the first flow of commercial electricity to the national grid from a nuclear source, Her Majesty not only ushered in another industrial era, but made it clear to all the world that (as has happened so often before) Britain once again takes the lead.”

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Nationalism aside, it was a remarkable achievement made even more so by the pace of the technological progress it represented. That the radioactive element uranium could undergo a chain reaction – a self-sustaining process that yielded an enormous amount of energy – had only been proven in the late 1930s. What happened to this energy if it was used to create some sort of bomb had become explosively apparent with the devastation caused in Japan in 1945 and subsequently through a series of tests as the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and France frantically developed their atomic capabilities and the world plunged ever deeper into the Cold War.

But even during these demonstrations of its ever-increasing destructive capabilities, uranium also represented a hope for an energy revolution; a future that didn’t rely on burning coal. And there was a real need in the 1950s to rethink how the world was powered after a period of shortages and rationing, which had been exacerbated by the war.

A reliance on coal was also having a devastating effect on health – a point driven home in December 1952 when ‘The Great Smog’ descended on London. While this type of air pollution had been seen many times before, and had been a problem since at least the 13th century, this particular five-day event was brutal and led to thousands of premature deaths and a huge amount of disruption due to poor visibility as the city was plunged into darkness. 

Nuclear energy offered a real hope to environmental campaigners who highlighted its small construction footprint and benefits over other renewable energy-generation technologies at the time. Unlike burning fossil fuels, it was seen as safe, clean, quiet and odourless.

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Britain’s lead in nuclear energy was brief and soon eclipsed by the United States, which opened its first commercial nuclear energy plant – the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania in 1956. And by the late 1970s, many countries in the world were heavily invested in nuclear energy, including the UK, Japan and France; the latter built 56 reactors in 15 years.

The US had followed up the success of Shippingport with a campaign to encourage private industry to adopt the new technology, with the ambition that by the year 2000, 50% of the country’s electricity would be generated from uranium fuel. In 2024 the actual figure is just under 20%.

In my book Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium I look at what happened to the hopes for uranium, from its identification in 1789, to its use in medicine, the journey to creating and detonating atomic bombs and then the dream of unlimited and cheap energy. I trace the stories of the scientists who unlocked the secrets of the atom, the “uranium fever” of desert prospectors encouraged by government bonuses, tourists in Las Vegas witnessing atomic tests from the comfort of their poolside loungers and how this all translated into the development of atomic culture from movies to jewellery to cocktails. 

Along the way there is an examination of some of our preconceptions from the risk of nuclear waste (and why we inaccurately think of it as green goo capable of turning turtles into pizza-loving, crime-solving mutants) to the question of radiation exposure levels and concerns around proliferation and nuclear accidents. 

It is by examining our nuclear past and how this affects our understanding of the utilisation of the technology today that we can move beyond ideological opposition and encourage a more nuanced dialogue about whether it is feasible – and desirable – to have a genuinely uranium-powered future.

Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium by Lucy Jane Santos is out now (Icon Books, £20). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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