Extracts from “A CENTURY OF OIL” published in 1997:

Extract from page 247 in reference to the Shell Thornton Research facility near Liverpool:

Thornton’s most unusual venture at this time was into radioactivity. This took two forms: the use of radioactive isotopes to monitor wear on piston rings in car engines, and the provision of lubricants for atomic reactors. The latter came about almost by chance, when samples of oil were subjected to radiation from Cobalt-60 to see the effect on the hydrocarbons. What was discovered was that one sample proved impervious to radiation, remaining liquid throughout the experiment. As it happened, a nuclear reactor was being built at Calder Hall in Cumbria, barely 90 miles from Thornton. Lubricating the reactor’s graphite moderators was a problem no one had yet satisfactorily answered, but Thornton’s fortuitous find was the basis of the solution.

Extracts from “A CENTURY OF OIL” published in 1997:

Extracts from pages 311 and 312

The venture into nuclear energy was even less successful – indeed, considerably less so. In the 1950s, when nuclear power began to generate electricity for civilian use, Shell was delighted (as we saw in chapter 13) to gain the contract to supply all the lubricants used in Calder Hall, Britain’s first commercial nuclear power station, and proceeded additionally to produce coke of extremely high purity for use in reactors. At the time there was a good deal of concern among shareholders that nuclear power could become a competitor to oil. Lord Godber (Shell Transport’s then chairman) dismissed these fears as exaggerated, but a watchful eye was kept on the nuclear industry’s development. On 2 April 1958, Shell Transport’s Minute Book recorded that ‘A paper on Atomic Power was placed before the Board and was the subject of a general discussion.’ Less than a year later, on 16 March 1959, John Berkin one of Shell Transport’s directors – reviewed for the benefit of his colleagues on the board a ‘Memo on Atomic Power …with particular reference to its cost compared with that of power from conventional fuels.’ The wisdom then was the same: there was no foreseeable likelihood of nuclear power even coming close to overtaking oil as a cheap and convenient source of energy. But by the early 1970s that view had changed. A toe was put in the nuclear water with the purchase of a 10% interest in a Dutch company called Ultra-Centrifuge Nederland, part of a British-Dutch-German arrangement for developing the centrifuge method of uranium enrichment; and in 1973 Shell announced its ‘first big step into nuclear energy’. In a 50:50 partnership with Gulf Oil, two businesses – General Atomic Company in the United States, and General Atomic International elsewhere – were established to develop, manufacture and market the second-generation High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors (HTGRs) and their fuels.

The initial cost to Shell was $200 million, with all subsequent costs to be shared equally with Gulf. For its money Shell acquired interests in a small 40-megawatt experimental plant in Peach-Bottom, Pennsylvania; a commercial-scale 330-megawatt plant in Colorado; six other larger HTGRs which were on order; and two more on which options had been taken. Nor was that all. HTGR technology was set to be introduced into France and West Germany, and possibly into the UK and Japan; and (as Shell Transport’s annual report for 1973 recorded) General Atomic was already working on several other developments, including inter alia an HTGR closed-cycle gas-turbine power plant, a gas-cooled fast breeder reactor, the use of HTGR heat in industry, nuclear fusion research and ‘the construction of the largest industrial light-water reactor fuel reprocessing plant in the United States.’

In the annual report there was, with all this, a blissful lack of technical explanation, even in the simplest terms. Probably few shareholders had any clear idea of the differences between types of reactors, or between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission as sources of power; but an annual report is hardly the place to attempt such explanations, and anyway – 0 brave new world! – they may not have wished for elucidation. Especially when set against the worrying and unfamiliar background of high-cost oil, it was enough to feel that their company was, as always, in the vanguard of modern energy supply.

At any time in our lives, we all (or most of us) do the best we can with the knowledge and tools currently available, and to many specialists and non-specialists alike, Shell’s entry into the nuclear field seemed a sensible idea. Proponents of nuclear power saw it as the clean, simple, eternally renewable fuel ofthe future, and nuclear fusion (the process at work in the sun) may yet prove to be just that. But the existing method of nuclear power generation (nuclear fission, the principle of the atomic bomb) was already a publicly contentious issue, soon exemplified – long before the much greater disaster at the Russian plant of Chernobyl in 1986 – by the episode at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when, on 28 March 1979, the cooling system of the plant’s No.2 reactor failed and led to a leak and partial melt-down of the uranium core, with radiation detectable over twenty miles away.

Three Mile Island was a great leap backwards for the nascent nuclear industry, hardening feelings that having a nuclear reactor on one’s doorstep might not be an unmitigated good. It was followed, moreover, by a ,series of five smaller but similar accidents in the US, which led the Nuclear Regulatory Commission temporarily to cease licensing the construction of new reactors.

Although General Atomic was not involved in any of these, Shell read them as a clear warning and decided there was not enough to be gained from remaining in an industry which was so expensive, so politically vulnerable, and so much the target of public protest. Those factors were quite sufficiently present in the oil industry anyway; one would have to be a glutton for punishment to seek them elsewhere as well. So, resolving to remove itself from active participation in the nuclear industry, Shell sold its interests in both General Atomic companies to Gulf Oil in 1980. Lasting a mere seven years, nuclear energy had been a short and costly byway – one which Shell would not follow again for a very long time, if ever.

A colour photograph on page 312 had the caption: In appearance oddly reminiscent of Shell’s pecten logo, the Doublet III experimental nuclear fusion device was developed by General Atomic.