Chapelcross: The UK Government’s Cold War nuclear weapons project. IT was 60 years ago this week that Chapelcross nuclear power station officially opened to inaugurate the commercial nuclear age in Scotland. On May 2, 1959, the Lord Lieutenant of Dumfriesshire, Sir John Crabbe, who called the new works “a monument to progress and the nuclear era”, performed the opening ceremony of Scotland’s first nuclear power station that sent electricity to the National Grid. Scotland already had Dounreay, very much an experimental nuclear power site where the UK Government wanted to develop fast breeder reactors. Three reactors were built there in the 1950s but did not export power to the National Grid until 1962.
The National 28th April 2019 read more »