Gone fission: a life spent at Dounreay

AS A youngster, Calder Bain wrote to the popular comic The Eagle outlining his desire to become an engineer in the relatively new enterprise that was the Dounreay nuclear plant. Six years later, a month short of his 16th birthday, he fulfilled the ambition when he was one of 30 new apprentice engineers taken on at the Caithness complex.

Fast forward half a century and Mr Bain, now a year past retirement age, is still working at Dounreay, helping knock down the buildings where he was once so keen to work.

This week, Mr Bain was part of a small delegation from Dounreay that visited Balmoral to present the Queen with a photographic album of Dounreay's history, including royal visits.

Yesterday he recalled his five-year apprenticeship working in various parts of the nuclear plant: "There was a great pioneering spirit on the site. There were a lot of top-class scientists there, but fast reactors were an unknown quantity."

After a spell making precision rigs used to carry out experiments at the Dounreay Fast Reactor he became a draughtsman in the design office and later became assistant manager at the fuel fabrication plant.

Since 2004 he has been helping decommission the Prototype Fast React

or (PFR) as part of the 2.6 billion plan to clean up the site over the next 15 years. He said the task of knocking down Dounreay's three reactors and associated plants and laboratories presents huge challenges: "No-one had ever taken apart reactors of the complexity of Dounreay's. The new generation of reactors were built with decommissioning in mind, but these were not.

"It was probably easier to build them in the first place than take them apart because of the radiation risk. It takes a lot of imagination and you have to come up with innovative ideas to take the plant apart."

And he has, earning a reputation for devising remote- control gadgets capable of working in the reactor's hostile environment.

In 2005 he designed the "Slinky", a device similar to the children's toy, to negotiate tight bends in PFR's pipework and was fitted with a spike to help drain away remaining pockets of sodium coolant. He also devised a remotely operated camera to scan inside the pipework and which had probes to gauge radiation.

Fifty years on, he plans to keep working: "I came in with the bricks, I'll go out with the bricks."

The 30-page photo album presented to The Queen includes images dating back to 1957 when the Queen Mother visited.