Question: What is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to you wile you have been working?

Douglas Blane answered on 21 Jun 2010:

Most nerve-wracking was being on a submarine that had just got a new nuclear reactor that we had designed. It was when I worked with Rolls-Royce.

They used to send us physicists and engineers out to test the reactors and make sure they were working the way we said they would. It gave us an extra incentive to get our sums right.

So there’s four of us and about six navy officers and men in this cramped wee room in Barrow-in-Furness, and the operator starts driving out the control rods. That’s how you get a nuclear reactor to start.

We’d worked out exactly where the rods had to be to get the reactor to go critical. That’s when it’s making as many neutrons as are being lost, and you can start getting power.

So the operator would drive the rods out a few millimetres then stop. We’d study the instruments that showed what the neutrons were doing. And we’d compare it with what we’d worked out they should be doing.

Each time the rods came out a little there’d be a burst of neutrons, then they’d die away again. That’s what we wanted to see.

What we didn’t want to see was a burst of neutrons that kept on growing. Because that meant either someone’s sums were wrong or the reactor hadn’t been built the way we’d said.

Either way you’re sitting on top of the most powerful energy source ever built, and it’s misbehaving.

We were in that room for five hours watching the instruments, drawing graphs, getting hot and sticky. Sometimes the needle seemed to take ages to fall back and, with the sweat in your eyes, you’d imagine it was rising.

It worked out fine in the end. But it was the longest five hours of my life.