The man who built three nuclear power stations and the channel tunnel

IN 1972 Jim Miles began writing his book The 109 Foot Regiments of the British Army. It wasn't until forty years later that he finally completed the epilogue, but you can forgive his tardy deadline. After all, he has been a bit busy.

A structural engineer, Mr Miles' career began at Wylfa nuclear power station in Anglesey. In the seventies he went on to be project manager for the one at Hartlepool, then deputy manager at Heysham nuclear power station during the 1980s.

Hartlepool nuclear power station.

By 1990 Mr Miles had helped to build one of the great belt structures linking the Danish islands of Zealand and Funen, which will be familiar to fans of Scandi-Noir's The Bridge.

If that wasn't enough he was put in charge of building the factory that made concrete linings for the channel tunnel. No wonder the book drafts had to wait.

"I was told find a site, build a factory, make 1,000 segments a day and your budget is £30 million," says Mr Miles. "I looked around and decided the Isle of Grain seemed the best place."

The channel tunnel's Isle of Grain fabricating plant.

Once the units were up and running, it was a bit like a huge sweet factory production line with moulds being filled every ten minutes and new ones put into place at the sound of a whistle.

Which of course attracted plenty of dignitaries looking for a guided tour.

"Dennis Thatcher came once," says Mr Miles. "I explained exactly what we were doing. He was fascinated and kept saying I must tell Margaret, I must tell Margaret."

Jim Miles shows Dennis Thatcher around the Isle of Grain fabricating factory.

One thing he probably didn't let the iron lady know was how many hours Mr Miles was working. The factory worked round the clock and ships loaded with raw materials would arrive first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. They needed to be checked and that meant 14 hour shifts, seven days a week for more than a year. Another thing that was hardly conducive for creative writing.

And presumably Mr Miles' wife was another lady not for turning, when she discovered just how little she would see of her husband.

These days he doesn't think much to the government going cap in hand to the French and Chinese for help with major construction projects like the new power station at Hinkley Point. When he was a project manager there were about 4,000 people under him. All of them highly skilled.

"We used to take on 40 apprentices every year at the nuclear power stations," says Mr Miles. "There were carpenters, bricklayers, electricians, the lot. After four years they were experienced people who knew precisely what to do.

Jim Miles in his days with Taylor Woodrow.

"Now we have to go abroad and say 'will you build a nuclear power station for us please?' When I was with Taylor Woodrow, everything that was going to be built Frank Taylor wanted to build it. We had three or four on the go all the time."

The one the firm constructed at Hartlepool, where Mr Miles was project manager, included 250 foot tall towers that were put up by a process called slip forming, where concrete is poured into a continuously moving carcasses.

The whole tower was encased in five foot timber moulds which were filled, then jacked up an inch at a time to produce continuous, flawless structures. Each tower took a couple of days to build.

"One of the reasons for putting these up as quickly as we could was to put a roof on it so that people could work inside in the dry," says Mr Miles.

There was another important consideration. Because the plant was being constructed close to an urban area, each of the reactors had to be housed in pre-stressed concrete pressure vessels to be acceptable to the surroundings.

"They were pre-stressed to hold them together," says Mr Miles. "At Hartlepool we had wire winding and used a little train going round and round to put it in place.

"You pre-stressed them by applying tension to hold the vessel together," says Mr Miles. "It was a bit like tightening a piece of string on your finger."

The reason for using wire is because in contrast to the spontaneous spread of brittle fracture in steel plates, the failure of one pre-stressing wire would not affect adjacent wires. This would prevent sudden failure. Hartlepool had eight boiler closure units and each in turn was pre-stressed with nine layers of wire windings on its outer shell.

"I've always said to people I would go onto the top of any of our pressure vessels inside the nuclear power station and eat my dinner," says Mr Miles.

Taylor Woodrow was also part of the channel tunnel consortium and trips inside to see how much progress was being made were sometimes a bit scary.

"It was like standing under a shower sometimes," says Mr Miles. "I remember thinking there's an awful lot of water up there."

He is very proud that the concrete segments made in his factory aren't bolted together, like in the French sector. British ones are simply held together by a keystone.

Modestly, Mr Miles says he was just doing his job, but at least one of his relatives would beg to differ.

"When one of my grandsons is taken through the tunnel, he tells everyone: my grandad built this. I think that's rather nice."

Wonder what he thinks to gramp's new book?

There are 30 countries worldwide operating 443 nuclear reactors for electricity generation and 66 new nuclear plants are under construction in 15 countries. Nuclear power plants provided 10.9 percent of the world's electricity production in 2012.

The largest nuclear reactor is the Sun. It uses nuclear reactions, a natural process, to convert hydrogen to helium.

The largest surface nuclear powered ship is not only over 50 years old, it’s still in service. The USS Enterprise was put into service in 1960 and is 1,122 feet long.

The former Soviet Union was the first world power to use nuclear energy to produce electrical power. The Obninsk Power Plant came online in 1954.

The Channel Tunnel is 31.4 miles long, making it the 11th longest tunnel in use. It has the longest undersea portion of any tunnel in the world (23.5 miles).

The first proposal for a tunnel was put forward by Albert Mathieu, a French engineer and included an artificial island half-way across for changing horses. Further proposals were considered by Napoleon III in 1856 and William Gladstone in 1865. David Lloyd George brought up the idea at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

It was finally built in 1994 and opened by The Queen and President Mitterrand.