Health and Safety

Abstract

‘When the scientists of America’, wrote one of them,¹ ‘became reasonably certain that they could produce a nuclear chain reacting pile, they were brought face to face with the hazards of such an undertaking.... Because of the dangers, some of the scientists doubted whether the programme could or should be prosecuted.’ In Britain practically no one seems to have doubted whether the British post-war project should be undertaken, despite General Groves’s comments (already quoted) to Lord Portal that ‘the best advice he could give about building a pile was not to build it’, and that he ‘would not be surprised to be called to the telephone any morning to hear the news that one of the [ Hanford] piles had “gone up”.’² The British project was considered by the few politicians and civil servants who knew about it to be of absolutely overriding importance; only a few had any idea of the new kind of hazard, while the American enterprise had demonstrated that apparently the dangers were manageable. Thus health and safety considerations were not a decisive factor in the prime decision to have an atomic energy project, though they loomed large in subsequent important decisions on siting the piles and the choice of systems, and in carrying out the programme.