Since that point a number of stations have been closed, and others are booked to follow.The 2 remaining Magnox nuclear stations and 4 of the 7 AGR nuclear stations are presently intended to be closed by 2015.This is a cause behind the UK's prediction 'energy gap ', though secondary to the decrease in coal creating capacity.However the oldest AGR nuclear power station was lately life-extended by a decade, and it's likely plenty of the others can be life-extended, seriously reducing the energy opening. Production of electricity is the sole practical use of nuclear energy within the context of daily existance. But while nuclear energy is restricted in its applications, it is nevertheless crucial ; nuclear power now produces more than a tenth of all of the electricity consumed around the globe. Round the turn of the 20 th century, scientists were intrigued by the idea of gigantic amounts of energy contained inside one small atom, and experimental work on what was commonly named 'splitting the atom' was being carried out independently in a couple of states.

The atom was split in England in 1932, by scientists John Cockcroft and ETS Walton, and this was followed by further experiments on atom evolution. Uranium was identified as a suitable part on which to conduct trials, and by 1935 scientists had carried out experiments from which they learned a good deal about radioactivity and chain reactions.By 1940 a theory of nuclear power had been put forward, and by the point WWII commenced, systematic information was satisfactorily advanced to grasp the probabilities of the atomic bomb. This was the start of the nuclear arms race, and in the decades that followed, nuclear power continued to be irreducibly linked with warfare, with the result that public reaction to this newly-developed source of power was terribly mixed.

Research into tranquil applications of nuclear power was being carried out alongside work on nuclear weapons. Power was first produced experimentally from nuclear power in America in December 1951, and was being produced commercially before the end of that decade. The first industrial-scale nuclear reactor was finished in 1956 in the United Kingdom, at Calder Hall, in Cumbria.It was regarded as having a twin purpose : to make plutonium, as an element of the nuclear weapons program, and to generate electric power which, it was claimed, would be 'too inexpensive to meter '. Sadly this hopeful prophecy didn't happen ; but nuclear power stations are no dearer to operate than fossil-fuelled ones.