This is the third and concluding part of a series of blogposts exploring the history of the UK’s nuclear programme. The pivot point of that programme was the decision, in the late 60’s, to choose, as the second generation of nuclear power plants, the UK’s home developed Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (AGR) design, instead of ..read more

This is the second of a series of three blogposts exploring the history of the UK’s nuclear programme. The pivot point of that programme was the decision, in the late 60’s, to choose, as the second generation of nuclear power plants, the UK’s home developed Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (AGR) design, instead of a light water reactor design from the USA. This has been described as one of the worse decisions ever made by a UK government. In my first post, “On the uses of White Elephants”, I discussed the way the repercussions of this decision have influenced UK government thinking about large infr ..read more

This is the first of a series of three blogposts exploring the history of the UK’s nuclear programme. The pivot point of that programme was the decision, in the late 60’s, to choose, as the second generation of nuclear power plants, the UK’s home developed Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (AGR) design, instead of a light water reactor design from the USA. This has been described as one of the worse decisions ever made by a UK government. In this first post, I’ll explore the way the repercussions of this decision have influenced UK government thinking about large infrastructure projects. A second po ..read more

I’m 63 now, so the idea that I should still be taking part in “adventure sports” is perhaps a little ridiculous. Nonetheless, rock climbing has been so much part of my life for so long that I still try and get out, generally for easy short climbs on the gritstone cliffs near my home in Derbyshire. There are things that I’ve done in my younger days that I have put behind me without much regret – I won’t be climbing frozen waterfalls in New England again, or winter climbing in the Lakes or Scotland. I do miss snowy mountains a bit, though I know I will never be a serious alpinist. But there’s on ..read more

I’ve been at the annual High Polymer Research Group meeting at Pott Shrigley this week; this year it had the very timely theme “Polymers in the age of data”. Some great talks have really brought home to me both the promise of machine learning and laboratory automation in polymer science, as well as some of the practical barriers. Given the general interest in accelerated materials discovery using artificial intelligence, it’s interesting to focus on this specific class of materials to get a sense of the promise – and the pitfalls – of these techniques. Debra Audis, from the USA’s National Inst ..read more

There will be a general election in the UK this year, and it is not impossible (to say the least) that the Labour opposition will form the next government. What might such a government’s policies imply for science and innovation policy? There are some important clues in a recent, lengthy speech – the 2024 Mais Lecture – given by the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, in which she sets out her economic priors. In the speech, Reeves sets out in her view, the underlying problems of the UK economy – slow productivity growth leading to wage stagnation, low investment levels, poor sk ..read more

Here is one of the foundational papers for the modern world – in effect, reporting the invention of optical fibres. Without optical fibres, there would be no internet, no on-demand video – and no globalisation, in the form we know it, with the highly dispersed supply chains that cheap and reliable information transmission between nations and continents that optical fibres make possible. This won a Nobel Prize for Charles Kao, a HK Chinese scientist then working in STL in Essex, a now defunct corporate laboratory. Optical fibres are made of glass – so, ultimately, they come from sand – as Ed C ..read more

In 2019 I wrote a blogpost called The challenge of deep decarbonisation, stressing the scale of the economic and technological transition implied by a transition to net zero by 2050. I think the piece bears re-reading, but I wanted to update the numbers to see how much progress we had made in 4 years (the piece used the statistics for 2018; the most up-to-date current figures are for 2022). Of course, in the intervening four years we have had a pandemic and global energy price spike. The headline figure is that the fossil fuel share of our primary consumption has fallen, but not by much. In 20 ..read more

In the last decade, the UK has had four significantly different sets of technology priorities, and a short, but disruptive, period, where such prioritisation was opposed on principle. This 3500 word piece looks at this history of instability in UK innovation policy, and suggests some principles of consistency and clarity which might give us some more stability in the decade to come. A PDF version can be downloaded here. Introduction The problem of policy churn has been identified in a number of policy areas as a barrier to productivity growth in the UK, and science and innovation policy is no ..read more

On the 22nd November, the Government published its Autumn Statement. This piece, published in Research Professional under the title Economic clouds cast gloom over the UK’s ambitions for R&D, offers my somewhat gloomy perspective on the implications of the statement for science and innovation. This government has always placed a strong rhetorical emphasis on the centrality of science and innovation in its plans for the nation, though with three different Prime Ministers, there’ve been some changes in emphasis. This continues in the Autumn Statement: a whole section is devoted to “Supportin ..read more