London’s Secret Nuclear Reactor
For more than
30 years, between 1962 and 1996, a nuclear reactor sat at the heart of London
tantalizingly close to a busy thoroughfare and to people’s homes and public
buildings. Its existence so close to the metropolis was kept a secret from the
public, because to tell the truth would have been extremely controversial.
The reactor
was located at the basement of King William Building at the old Royal Naval
College in Greenwich. The Royal Naval College was established in 1873 and was
housed in a 17th century building complex designed by the highly acclaimed
English architect of the time, Sir Christopher Wren. The buildings originally
housed the Greenwich Hospital—a retirement home for disabled sailors of the
Royal Navy. The word “hospital” merely meant a place providing hospitality.
After the hospital closed in 1869, these buildings became the Royal Naval
College where navy officers were trained.
The Old Royal
Naval College in Greenwich, the site of the world’s only reactor ever installed
inside a Grade I-listed 17th-century building.
In the
beginning, the Royal Naval College was only a staff college where military
officers were trained in the administrative duties of their profession. Later,
with the transfer of the Royal Naval War College’s activities from Portsmouth
to Greenwich in 1914, the Royal Naval College began to provide technical
trainings in tactical and strategic naval warfare as well. As the years rolled
by, these trainings became more and more sophisticated.
In the early
1960s, the Royal Naval College acquired a low-power nuclear reactor nicknamed
JASON to educate and train military and civilian personnel involved in the
naval nuclear submarine propulsion program. The Argonaut series 10 kW research
reactor was previously operated by the Hawker Siddley Nuclear Power Corporation
at Langley.
Compared to
those in nuclear power stations, JASON was a small reactor measuring 12 feet
high and was surrounded by more than 300 tons of steel and concrete cladding to
prevent stray neutrons from escaping. Despite its small size, Jason was potent.
According to the Independent, JASON used weapons-grade
uranium 90 per cent enriched, which made it thirty times more radioactive than
that used in commercial reactors. It was like a ticking time bomb. Surely, the
Navy wasn’t going to tell Londoners they have a nuclear bomb for a neighbor. So
JASON was kept a secret.
Control panel
for the JASON nuclear reactor. Photo credit: Royal Naval College, Greenwich
“For a long
while he was part-myth,” writes The Greenwich Phantom.
“The weird thing is that I had heard from someone who worked with it directly
(and who had no reason to lie) that it was just a model – that there was never
any radioactivity in it, they just told the trainees there was to make them
deal with it seriously.”
The funny
thing is, Greenwich was declared, and continue to be a “nuclear-free” zone
since 1963, a year after the nuclear reactor JASON went critical.
In 1996, the
Navy decided to decommission the Naval College and hand the
property over to civilian use, which meant that JASON had to go. But getting
rid of him completely proved to be no easy task. First they had to disable the
reactor itself and remove the operational equipment, which was the easy part
and was completed swiftly. The hard part was removing the fuel, and dismantling
the reactor and the concrete cladding that had become irradiated by neutrons
over the years.
At that time,
no nuclear reactor had ever been dismantled in Britain, so everything had to be
learned from scratch.
In the end,
which took three years, a total of 270 tons of nuclear waste was removed from
the area. In November 1999, the Environment Agency finally gave the
radiological clearance.
Today, live
reactor training is carried out at the Imperial College Consort reactor at
Ascot. The Royal Navy also uses simulators to impart education and training of
military and civilian personnel in the naval nuclear propulsion program at the
Royal Navy’s School of Marine and Air Engineering at HMS Sultan, Gosport,
Hampshire.
The
magnificent buildings of the Royal Naval College, now a UNESCO World Heritage
Site, is a popular attraction in Greenwich. Pictured above is the interior of
the Royal Naval College Chapel.
One of the architectural
highlights of the Old Royal Naval College, the Painted Hall, which was painted
between 1707-1726 by Sir James Thornhill.
The Painted
Hall served as the dining hall for the Royal Naval College.
Ceiling of
the Painted Hall.
The Royal
Navy College cafeteria located in the basement under the Chapel.
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