Skip to main content

It’s Good to Be the Queen

calder-hall Because you get to do fun things like this:

Ground was broken yesterday on the UK's Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (NAMRC) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, who used virtual reality to operate a digger.

And what might this freshly dug Centre do?

The new facility is intended to "help UK companies become global leaders in the production of components and systems for the new generation of nuclear power stations" said the University of Sheffield. The other main collaborators in the project are the University of Manchester, the government and Rolls-Royce as lead industrial partner.

Rolls-Royce again – see the post below for more on that company. But what about Queen Elizabeth? It turns out she’s been hanging around nuclear energy plants as long they’ve been in England. Here she is in 1956:

The Queen has opened the world's first full-scale nuclear power station, at Calder Hall in Cumberland.

A crowd of several thousand people gathered to watch the opening ceremony, which was also attended by scientists and statesmen from almost 40 different countries.

That event spurred considerable optimism:

The Lord Privy Seal, Richard Butler, described the event as "epoch-making".

He added, "It may be that after 1965 every new power station being built will be an atomic power station."

And if that had occurred, some of the larger conversations taking place today would be considerably muted. Certainly, the need for energy security would remain much the same – unless cars switched to flux capacitors – while concerns over global warming might be less urgent.

Or not. ‘What If’ is a fun game, with part of the fun being able to ignore all factors except the ones you want to include. The world would always be a better place if it were organized according to our personal interests – wouldn’t it?

Anyway, it remains a fun notion to think of the queen being there at the beginning of nuclear energy in England and still there to see it through to a new generation. I fully expect her to be there when it is her hologram running a virtual digging machine to build an avatar of a nuclear energy plant.

The Calder Hall plant. It operated until 2003, just shy of its 50th birthday.

Comments

Tim Chapman said…
Thanks for the write-up, Mark - HRH did seem to enjoy her experience with the VR system (not sure how she'd feel about some of the reports comparing her to Lady Gaga, though).

If you need more info about the Nuclear AMRC, please see -
http://www.namrc.co.uk

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should