On this day in 1956, Calder Hall became the first nuclear power station to supply domestic electricity, so what went wrong? Asks Eliot Wilson

Sixty-nine years ago today, on 27 August 1956, the United Kingdom reached an extraordinary scientific and industrial milestone. Calder Hall Nuclear Power Station near Seascale on the coast of Cumbria was connected to the National Grid, and became the first nuclear plant in the world to supply electricity for domestic use.

Calder Hall’s four carbon dioxide-cooled Magnox reactors – each weighing 33,000 tonnes, ten times a contemporary Daring-class destroyer – had the capacity to generate 240 MWe, enough for hundreds of thousands of homes, and must have been a striking contrast to the coal-fired plants on which Britain had up till then relied. Atomic energy powering domestic appliances, just 11 years after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: this was truly the beating of swords into ploughshares.

What seems even more remarkable today is that the power station had been built in almost exactly three years. Once the Ministry of Supply, which would cede responsibility for........

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