Tower and Town, May 2026 (view the full edition)Harwell: A Fading View From Building 418Tomorrow is Bright On 8 May 1945 joyous crowds at Piccadilly Circus, London, were celebrating the ending of WWII and dreaming of the brighter tomorrow ahead. Rising from the ashes of war with many years of rationing still lying ahead there was enough air of optimism at Piccadilly and elsewhere on that VE Day. It, therefore, followed that by the era of the ascending young minds of the 1950s-60s generation the Piccadilly air of optimism and western perseverance had already aided in realising both the Space Age and the Atomic Age. You can imagine, dear reader, that I was fortunate enough to grow up anticipating a better tomorrow. And it is in the spirit of that era that in the early 1970s I joined the cadre of aspiring young scientists at the cusp of the Atomic Age, aiming to harness the power of the atom for the good of humanity. The chasing of this dream eventually brought me on a full-time basis during the 1980s to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, Oxfordshire. Sadly, I soon realised that brighter tomorrows sometimes never come or they merely fade away. This I learnt from witnessing the eclipsing of the atomic dream. My Years at Harwell Just over 12 miles north of Newbury, Berkshire, 1950s-80s travellers along the A34 road towards Oxford would have climbed Gore Hill, whose summit intersects the ancient Ridgeway, Britain's oldest road. On descending they would have been struck by the view ahead left - the Jewel of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, UKAEA, the sprawling site of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, AERE, Harwell. Created after the Second World War on the site of RAF Harwell, the research establishment became a beacon for what was thought to be at that time a brighter tomorrow of endless energy supply facilitated by the "Atom for Peace" programme. My association with Harwell started when, as a physics postgraduate student, I gained in 1970 security clearance to enrol in the UKAEA Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technology training that included spending some time at Harwell. By the mid 1970s I became indebted to a known Harwell leader, Dr. Geoffrey Dearnally, FRS, who noted some pioneering research I was conducting at academia and gained for me American financial support to produce the international handbook of the subject. Our story, below, begins when in 1982 I was awarded by the UKAEA a special Harwell/academic research position to work at the Nuclear Physics Division in Harwell, then under the headship of the fission theoretical physicist Dr Eric Lynne. This required joining the linear accelerator and nuclear fission group, led by Dr Michel Coates, at Building 418, (B418). One of the bonuses was outings with my fellow physicists and included ramblings along the Ridgeway which overlooked our research establishment Tomorrow Never Comes By the early 1980s the wind of political and environmental change had already shifted public interests away from nuclear energy, and soon Britain was to lose its edge as developer and builder of nuclear power stations, compounded by abandoning our lead in fast breeder reactor technology that facilitated re-using spent fuel from nuclear power stations. This specifically was, in due course, to have a devastating effect on the elite nuclear physics group based at B418. On Monday 28 April 1986 the nuclear linear accelerator neutron source group at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, Oxfordshire gathered for the morning tea/coffee break at the conference room of B418. It was certainly a defining time for the group as the group leader and cheerful gentleman, Dr Mike Coates, walked in wearing his blue V-neck jumper and red tie, holding as usual his mug in one hand and clasping his teaspoon between tips of the index finger and thumb of the other hand. He sat as usual on a blue upholstered chair backing against the southern window. He somehow didn't seem himself on this occasion as the group grappled with last Saturday's news - explosion at the no. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located near Pripyat, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Ukraine). And as I sat opposite Mike Coates it dawned on me that we were witnessing the ending of the atomic age, and my sight began drifting slowly towards the window behind him, gazing at the soon to fade away view of our beloved Ridgeway from B418. Not long after, my dear senior colleages at B418 accepted retirement, severing our leadership in the physics of nuclear fission; and for some of the younger ones their future was elsewhere. A few members of the group took up directorship positions at other government laboratories; and for me it was firstly a stint in the high-technology industry followed by an encore at the dreamy spires of academia (Oxford). Raik Jarjis |