In the early 1960s the pioneers of the early nuclear power industry arrived with their blueprints and let’s-get-things-done philosophy, sucking on ostentatiously large pipes, to answer the politicians’ demands for science to deliver a previously undreamt-of prosperity.

The future of nuclear power is high up the political agenda once again, thanks to the travails of British Energy. The Government’s long-awaited energy White Paper, due in the next few weeks, is expected to include a moratorium on new nuclear power stations.

Nuclear power produces about a quarter of the UK’s electricity. Most magnox stations are due to close by 2010 and the Government is looking seriously at the extent to which nuclear power remains essential to protect the security of Britain’s energy supplies. Experts argue that, without a diverse and sustainable energy policy, the UK risks California-style electricity blackouts.

David Evans, now 73, and Harry Lawton, 80, are survivors of the original management team that set up and ran Britain’s first advanced nuclear reactor, the prototype Windscale Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (WAGR). Its distinctive golf ball shape became a potent symbol of this new era.

Forty years on, they returned to Windscale (now called Sellafield) to see how their “baby” is being dismantled as part of a showpiece £80 million decommissioning project. On a sentimental journey inside the familiar silver dome, they watched robotic arms shear, grind and saw the remains of the reactor core, laboriously, piece by irradiated piece.

They recalled fondly an earlier, more confident age when nuclear power, so long associated in the public mind with the H-bomb, was about to escape the mushroom cloud and become a force for good. All these years later, their faith in the nuclear future still burns fiercely.

Evans, the works manager who pushed the button to take the reactor “critical” in August 1962, says: “I am more enthusiastic now than I have ever been. Some of that is due, no doubt, to the fact that we now have a fight on our hands. People who know about nuclear power and understand the benefits it can bring have a duty to preach the gospel.”

In the early 1960s there was almost universal support for the nuclear option. It was the time when Harold Wilson famously invoked a world of unprecedented prosperity and leisure made possible by the “white heat” of technological revolution.

Windscale’s management, some of whom had come straight from the Ministry of Supply, believed in the sanctity of science as they set about their task to demonstrate that advanced gas-cooled reactors were the way forward.

Some, like Evans and Lawton, came to WAGR from Calder Hall, across the site, where they had built a pressurised water reactor and brought it on-stream inside two years and ten months. “It would take 25 years now because of the paperwork, the obdurate obsession with safety, the inquiries and so on,” says Lawton, who oversaw the WAGR project as the head of the AEA Laboratories.

Evans pulls out a faded black and white photograph of the moment when there was enough fuel inside the reactor to start producing energy. He is shown, a white-coated figure before a metal console of buttons and graphs, clutching a cigarette in one hand and pressing the button to go “critical” with the other.

Passing through Sellafield’s security gates is like taking a trip back in time. WAGR’s offices resemble a flimsy Avengers film set complete with scuffed lino, Formica and threadbare carpet squares. A surprising number of people still occupy the plant, 22 years after it ceased to generate.

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