Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Kirsty Young
Nuclear scientist, first woman to win the Royal Academy of Engineering's President's Medal, persuaded Tony Blair to change nuclear policy
Eight records
Well my first piece of music is a piece by John Miles called Music and it's from the album Rebel because when I graduated from my university my dad was very kind and bought me a record player and I didn't have any records at the time and my then boyfriend, subsequently my husband, loaned me his Pride and Joy which was the John Miles album.
Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Opera Berlin
It was what was sung by our school choir when it was Prize Day in Preston Public Hall. And as head girl at the time, I had to give a small speech and I was so nervous because it's the first time I'd ever done anything like that. So whenever I hear that music, I get a shiver down my spine and I can envisage the audience at the Public Hall in Preston.
One of our good friends in the 1990s decided he was going to get his qualifications as a skipper for a yacht, so he coerced the other five to become competent or semi-competent anyway crew members. And we started off in Scotland. So sailing down the west coast of Scotland past the Sands and Moora playing Mark Knopfler's theme was just ideal.
Gloria in excelsis DeoFavourite
I've chosen that because when I went to the school I had the opportunity to learn to play the violin and I sat next to a girl called Dorothy who was an oboeist and she encouraged me to go with her to join Preston Youth Orchestra and the first piece that I ever had to play as a member of the orchestra was Vivaldi's Gloria.
The track I've chosen, because I was really struggling to pick one, is in fact Radio Gaga. It sticks in my memory because it was played at Live Aid with Freddie Mercury literally with the audience in his hands. And the only reason we saw it was because we'd been on a camping holiday with my cousin near Hexham and the weather was so awful we packed up and went home and Live Aid was on the TV that afternoon.
Well the next one is an Elton John song, your song in fact, because it brings back memories from my university days when I was doing a PhD here in London. And I shared a flat with an American called Gracie and she was a passionate Elton John fan and it brought me into contact with him and his music and I've been a fan ever since.
My seventh piece is actually the link to skiing which uh we have uh and it's uh Bruce Hornsby and the Range the way it is and it and it's because uh on one of our skiing holidays there was a fantastic pianist playing in a piano bar in Valdez Air and that was what he was playing and so every time it plays I think of ski slopes.
My final piece is from a group called Journey, Who's Crying Now from the album Escape. That brings back memories for me of a grand tour that John and I did of the northeastern US and Canada back in the 1980s. So it was a driving marathon and at the time this band and the song was top of the charts in North America. So it was being played every couple of hours on the radio and it was an American car with an absolutely amazing stereo system compared to the ones that we had in the UK at the time. So that's the memory that it brings back for me.
The keepsakes
The book
Alfred Wainwright
I'd actually like to take the box set of Wainwright walks. These are exquisite and accurate illustrations with full descriptions of the routes of the walks in the Lake District with many of the walks that I've done over the years. And I thought that would be great to be able to look through those and have the image in my mind of the walk up through the fells in the Lake District with family and friends.
The luxury
I'll plump for a guitar because music does mean a lot to me and I'd like to learn to play it properly. So a guitar with a set of uh music from beginner all the way up to something better.
In conversation
Presenter asks
How much do you think the public understands? I mean, it is a pressing need now for us to solve the problems of where we get our energy supply from.
I think the public are probably more aware now than they were say 10, 15 years ago because they've woken up to the fact that there's a link between the price that they pay for their electricity and oil and gas prices and also are getting more concerned about the security of supply. I think many people know now that we are actually importers of oil and gas, not exporters anymore.
Presenter asks
When you hear a breaking news story about nuclear power, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, what is your initial gut reaction?
Your heart usually sinks, but then you have to look at the facts. So, from that point of view, there was a very big difference between Chernobyl, say, and Fukushima, where people right across the globe were concerned about Chernobyl, and here, of course, we were concerned because of the impact it had on, for instance, lamb and agriculture at the time. But Fukushima was different because people understood it was a tsunami and an earthquake that caused the tsunami, and so the impact on our power stations wasn't there. And people actually understood it was more an ecological disaster than it was a radiation disaster.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Presenter
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
Presenter
For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.
Presenter
My castaway this week is the nuclear scientist Dr. Dame Sue Ian. The first woman to be awarded the highly prestigious President's Medal by the Royal Academy of Engineering, she has worked her way to the heart of an industry that remains one of the most contentious in society. She's credited with convincing Tony Blair's government to change policy on nuclear power and embrace its potential.
Presenter
Her passion for understanding how and why the world works the way it does first began as she tinkered for hours at her parents' kitchen table with a little chemistry set, the flames and smells of each experiment igniting her curiosity and fuelling a desire to learn that has lasted a lifetime.
Presenter
It's a passion she seems determined to pass on in the work she does inspiring pupils to understand the significance and satisfaction of working in her industry. She says
Presenter
There was a time post Chernobyl when it seemed better not to tell people at parties what I did, but attitudes have changed hugely. You still have to be a bit of an evangelist, but it's a pleasure to engage with people who have open minds. So uh welcome, Dame Sue Ian. It's very nice to have you here. You you've spent thirty years of your working life then concerned with our nuclear energy supplies. How much do you think the public understands? I mean, it is a pressing need now for us to solve the problems of where we get our energy supply from.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
I think the public are probably more aware now than they were say 10, 15 years ago because they've woken up to the fact that there's a link between the price that they pay for their electricity and oil and gas prices and also are getting more concerned about the security of supply. I think many people know now that we are actually importers of oil and gas, not exporters anymore.
Presenter
When you hear a breaking news story, as inevitably we have done throughout the years, and it's a bad story about nuclear power, for example, on the scale of something like Chernobyl or Fukushima, what is your initial gut reaction?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Your heart usually sinks, but then you have to look at the facts. So, from that point of view, there was a very big difference between Chernobyl, say, and Fukushima, where people right across the globe were concerned about Chernobyl, and here, of course, we were concerned because of the impact it had on, for instance, lamb and agriculture at the time. But Fukushima was different because people understood it was a tsunami and an earthquake that caused the tsunami, and so the impact on our power stations wasn't there. And people actually understood it was more an ecological disaster than it was a radiation disaster.
Presenter
From the career question to the very personal question, I I hear that you're a devotee of Chris Evans on Radio Two in the morning, and that strikes me that you must be a wi are you one of these people who bounces out of bed? Are you full of full of energy? Uh I'm usually pretty good in the mornings, yes. Okay. And on that basis then, um tell me about your first piece of music. What is this and why have you chosen it?
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 1
The E for the
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well my first piece of music is a piece by John Miles called Music and it's from the album Rebel because when I graduated from university my dad was very kind and bought me a record player and I didn't have any records at the time and my then boyfriend, subsequently my husband, loaned me his Pride and Joy which was the John Miles album.
Speaker 2
Without my music
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Uh
Speaker 2
The people imposed all together.
Speaker 2
In this world of troubles
Speaker 2
My music pulls me through
Presenter
That was music from John Miles. So, Suyin, only eight per cent I read of all engineers in Britain are female. That's a shocking figure. I mean, I was properly shocked when I read that. What's the problem?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, the problem is the lack of girls doing A level physics that's the problem. The way the subject is taught and the the topics that are within it don't appeal as much to girls as they do to boys, and also for girls that it's not cool to do physics.
Presenter
You do go into schools, you talk to young women and men when they're choosing their subjects. What's your advice to them?
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
My v
Presenter
But
Dr Dame Sue Ion
The price is to stick with the science subjects as long as you can. And the world is open to you if you continue. You know, if you do science up to A level, you can still be anything. You can still be a writer, a historian, a musician. But if you stop doing your science subjects at an early age, then you're cutting off pretty much everything that's scientific and engineering.
Presenter
Bring in your future life. That umbrella term of engineering, tell me about the things that it encompasses that most people might be surprised by.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, it encompasses everything from the sophisticated software engineering. It enables you to talk to your granny on Skype, that sort of thing. It covers fashion and the engineering of clothes. It covers sophisticated medical devices and implants and all the analysis that goes with them. So there's a massive bandwidth of things that you just wouldn't anticipate.
Presenter
The word nuclear is a very difficult word. It's a hot potato, isn't it? When we say it I mean, not for you it isn't, but for a lot of people so you must be aware that it is. You know, they think of mushroom clouds, they think of finger on the button, they think of all those negative associations simply with the word I'm talking about now. How can stark scientific facts combat people's prejudices about the word?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
For young people of today, the word isn't quite as emotive as it is for people, say, in their forties, fifties, sixties.
Presenter
Ah, why is that?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Just because they grow up with a different outlook and a different approach to technology, to the way they learn, the way they understand, and the wider access to things, many people don't understand that nuclear coming from nuclear energy isn't any different from nuclear coming from medicine. And so they're quite happy to go and have an analytical procedure which involves drinking a radioactive liquid, or to have an X-ray or a CT scan or an MRI scan, and they wouldn't think twice about it.
Presenter
Course I'm sending you to a little desert island.
Presenter
How would you generate your own energy there? I mean, are you you're a practical sort?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, I guess if there was wind, you'd you'd hopefully start by uh building a small wind turbine. Could you do that? And get the raw m um I'd probably have to put my thinking cap on how to do that. I get the feeling you probably could, but uh tell me about your second piece. It's the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
It was what was sung by our school choir when it was Prize Day in Preston Public Hall. And as head girl at the time, I had to give a small speech and I was so nervous because it's the first time I'd ever done anything like that. So whenever I hear that music, I get a shiver down my spine and I can envisage the audience at the Public Hall in Preston.
Speaker 1
Come on.
Speaker 2
There's a love and beauty.
Presenter
The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Verni's Nabucco, performed there by the Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Opera Berlin, conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli. So, Dr. Dane Suyan, we've spoken a little about the prejudices that often surround engineering in this day and age, especially at school age for a lot of our children. You were born in 1955. What was it, do you think, about your upbringing and schooling then that it meant that it was prejudice-free in those matters?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
My mum and dad had uh two daughters and so we were always uh treated equally and my dad used to have us help in whatever he was doing. I was quite happy to help him dig the garden and to uh get a hammer out and a saw and he was quite happy to have me in the garage messing about with him. I can remember, you know, building a go-kart out of bits of old pram stuff that we got from a scrapyard to compete in a go-kart race down the road, yeah.
Presenter
And and tell me about those now. I think they were called Better Builder, spelled B I L D A. These these little sets that were the sort of science sets of the time. I was having a look at them. I noticed it was all little boys that were on the front of them, of course. But but you had one, did you? I did.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Was that it?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, I had both. I had both a a set of bricks that were a bit like Lego that you could build things out of. And I also had a chemistry set.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
What did you love? Which experiments particularly captured your imagination?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Uh
Dr Dame Sue Ion
The ones that made the smells and the ones that uh where you put things in water and they grow into crystals. Yes. And and things that changed colour, things that fizzed and banged.
Presenter
Goals list.
Presenter
Neither of your parents went to university. What what were their jobs?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well my mum was uh a secretary and uh my dad was uh a planning officer for British Railways as it was at the time. You got cheap fares I imagine.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yes, yes I did. We used to always get the train down to the south coast for our holidays when we were younger. And then when we were in our our teens, international travel became possible, so we were able to travel once a year somewhere abroad. So we went to Italy on the train with my mum and dad and sister for the last uh five, six years that I was able to do that.
Presenter
Let's have some more music. Uh Sue, tell me about this. This is your third of the morning.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yeah, my third one is Mark Knopfler's wild theme from the film Local Hero. One of our good friends in the 1990s decided he was going to get his qualifications as a skipper for a yacht, so he coerced the other five to become competent or semi-competent anyway crew members. And we started off in Scotland. So sailing down the west coast of Scotland past the Sands and Moora playing Mark Knopfler's theme was just ideal.
Presenter
That was Mark Knopfler playing Wild Theme from the film Local Hero, and it was composed by Mark Knopfler and Alan Clark. So, Suyin, you attended Penwartham Girls' Grammar School in Preston, where you became friends with another really very eminent scientist, the neuroscientist Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell.
Presenter
Was it a meeting of minds at that stage? Did you know each other? Did you
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Get on? We sat next together in uh in physics when we did our A
Presenter
Devils. Was there something about the teaching of it, the way it was communicated to you, and the way you were treated as a young female pupil that made you think, Yeah, I'm up for this, and this is for me?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Being at an all-girls school, there was no pressure for girls to do one thing, boys to do another. So you did what you were good at and the things that you found easier, I guess. You built things in physics, you did the chemical experiments yourselves, you mixed all the chemicals, the liquids, you played around with buns and burners. Whereas today it's much more restrained and restricted, lots of safety barriers between you and doing things, and quite often you just sit and watch the teacher rather than do. We had a great time at school. Uh
Presenter
Did you ever come acropper?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
No, but might have had a couple of clichés.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
But if you don't actually make or do things in an applied sense, you just lose the feel and the sense of what it's all about. So it was much more exciting when you could do those sort of things.
Presenter
Now, when did you first come into contact with something you were aware was atomic energy and why did it interest you?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
maybe fourth or fifth form as it was at the time at school. And it was just a topic that was on the news at the time. It was the beginning of atomic energy in the UK. And it was seen as a great, exciting, great advance for science. I thought it sounded really good, really cool.
Presenter
You are interested in in logic, in science, in fact. How were you at school at the more sort of touchy-feely subject? How was your English, how was your art?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yeah, art I wasn't very good at.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
But I mean English history I was okay at, but I mean to be brutally honest, I didn't used to like writing essays for homework. Why was that?
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Maybe because it it required more imagination. And that sounds kind of odd, because I've got imagination when it comes to engineering and seeing what you can do in that space, but uh
Presenter
Yes.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
It just didn't excite me as much as making and building and doing things and w and understanding how things work.
Presenter
You are a leader in your field. You were head girl at school, and yet I read only deputy leader of the orchestra. Why were you not lead violin in the orchestra?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Because it wasn't that good actually.
Presenter
Is that true?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
That's true, yes. You know, there was a very talented leader of the orchestra and yeah, I would never have made leader of an orchestra.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Um time now for your next piece of music, then, so you tell me what we're going to hear, your fourth.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
My next piece is from Vivaldi's Gloria and Excelsi's Deo. And I've chosen that because when I went to the school I had the opportunity to learn to play the violin and I sat next to a girl called Dorothy who was an oboeist and she encouraged me to go with her to join Preston Youth Orchestra and the first piece that I ever had to play as a member of the orchestra was Vivaldi's Gloria.
Speaker 2
Jesus has done all.
Speaker 2
They are soundly fair.
Speaker 2
As we stood.
Presenter
Vivaldi's Gloria Inex Chelsis Deo, performed by the English Concert and Choir, directed by Trevor Pinnock. So, Suyin, you got a first class degree and then you went on to to do your PhD and you worked at the time, am I right in thinking, in inner city comps to earn a bit of extra cash to pay your way through, is that right? At the time.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
what was the In London Education Authority were desperately short of science teachers, and so they recruited postgraduate students like me to supply teach in some of their harder schools.
Presenter
I'm wondering what you were learning from the pupils. I mean, you were just a young woman yourself, what did it teach you about life, about their lives? Yeah.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yeah.
Presenter
It was just
Dr Dame Sue Ion
So completely different from anything that I'd ever experienced. It was at an all-girls school, but boy, was it a tough all-girls school down between Brixton and Clapham. I can remember at the time going for an interview with the head and her saying to me, Well, we need you to teach physics from Easter, and this was February, but will you start next week and teach the first and second years maths?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
And I said
Dr Dame Sue Ion
But I haven't done any teaching. So I went home that weekend and rang up my old headmistress and said, Help. And she opened up my old school, Pemerlam Girls' School, and sat me down and said, This is what you got to do to get by for the first couple of weeks. How did it go?
Presenter
Pages.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
It was really, really tough because they were unstreamed kids and so you had some who were actually pretty well qualified kids and you had other ones that just weren't interested in learning at all. The kids used to have to walk around with all their bags and coats and things because there wasn't adequate provision for it and the labs were very, very poorly equipped. In the end I took some stuff down from Imperial College so that we could teach physics stuff properly.
Presenter
Was there a point where with any particular pupil you thought, Yeah, I've done it, I've won them over to my side of thinking, they're gonna go and pursue something that otherwise they might not have been interested in?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, I only taught them up to what was at the time CSE and then O level.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
But it was only years later that I realized I was at a conference and a voice behind me said, Miss, miss.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
And I turned round and it was one of the girls that I'd taught, and she was now working as a graduate for British.
Presenter
So you joined uh British nuclear fuels in nineteen seventy nine, working at a plant just outside Preston in the engineering and development department, where I think it was only, what, two percent of the workforce there were women.
Presenter
Uh what was that like?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
That was fine. I mean, I guess I've got used to living in a a world where most of the people that I I came into contact with were guys. People cared more about
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Whether you did a good job or not.
Presenter
Do you think women bother too much about things statistics like that? Do you think they just need to, you know, do a Sheryl Sandberg and lean in?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yes, I think so. I mean, I w I wouldn't worry about how many men there were in uh a team or a um a room or anything like that. It just go and be yourself.
Presenter
Let's have some more music then, Sue Ian. What are we going to hear now?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
The next one is from Queen, that wonderful band with links to Imperial College. The track I've chosen, because I was really struggling to pick one, is in fact Radio Gaga. It sticks in my memory because it was played at Live Aid with Freddie Mercury literally with the audience in his hands. And the only reason we saw it was because we'd been on a camping holiday with my cousin near Hexham and the weather was so awful we packed up and went home and Live Aid was on the TV that afternoon.
Speaker 2
I'd sit alone and watch your life
Speaker 2
My only friend
Speaker 2
Is everything?
Speaker 2
I heard you know
Speaker 2
I heard it on my radio
Speaker 2
Those old time stars
Speaker 2
Where's the word?
Speaker 2
You made by Mars, you made them land, you made em try.
Presenter
That was Queen and Radio Gaga. So, Dr. Dame Su Ian, as we said, 1979 then was the year you joined British nuclear fuels. It was also the year of the Three Mile Island accident that happened, of course, across in the USA. It was that partial meltdown, the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power plant history. In 1986, we then went on to the Chernobyl disaster. It was this catastrophic fire. I think 31 people died immediately in Ukraine, and there were all the health implications for thousands years after.
Presenter
How much did these subsequent disasters impact, do you think, on the long term energy policy of Britain? And don't you also think that it was entirely understandable that people took a very long look and a step back?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yeah, I do think people took a long look and a step back, but it wasn't just the nuclear issue that caused the step back in energy policy. Three Mile Island certainly had an impact, but it was a commercial impact. It wasn't an impact of radiation or anything like that, but it affected people's psyche. And it affected people's psyche because at the time it happened, a film had just come out called The China Syndrome with Jane Sorry and Jane Fonder about a meltdown in a US power station. And Michael Douglas, yes.
Presenter
And Michael Douglas, yes, he was a very, very successful film. My lifetime.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Absolutely. So everybody was familiar with the film because they'd been to see it. And so when Freemile Island happened, it was, oh, it's like the China syndrome, which of course it wasn't. And then with respect to Chernobyl, there was a lot of misinformation around post-Chernobyl about long-term health impact. And when you look at the World Health Organisation statistics after proper analysis has been done over decades, then the impact actually is not that significant at all. And most of the impact was in the firefighters immediately, not those who were affected subsequently. Apart from people who were affected from a thyroid point of view, which could have been fixed at the time had there been a faster response. But long-term impact on people's health, no, other than stress of having to move and evacuate.
Presenter
You held a seat on Tony Blair's Council for Science and Technology when he was in government. How did you persuade the Labour government to make their U-turn? I think that was happened around about two thousand six when they said, yes, actually, we are going to embrace nuclear power and nuclear technology. It can be part of the future of our energy generation policy.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well I think the Council itself had worked quite hard to put together the facts and the figures and the evidence and I think just generally they were starting to look more at the fact that it just the figures don't add up. You can't have the electricity that you need in the UK by only having renewables. Nuclear energy has two things going for it. Number one, it is a very energy dense form of energy. So you know you only need a tiny amount to create a huge amount of energy. For instance a five metre core will deliver sixteen hundred megawatts of energy. That's the core of the Hinkley Point reactor. Okay so sixteen hundred megawatts supplies what? It supplies a few million people.
Presenter
Okay.
Presenter
Members of the public who still feel
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Mem
Presenter
worried at their heart about nuclear energy say, yes, we can understand that this is a highly efficient and clean way of generating the energy we require to live our lives, but when things go wrong, they go wrong big.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, I think the the safety systems that accompany modern nuclear power stations do enable you to have confidence in that type of technology going forward. I'm not against renewables. In fact, I think what we need to have is a balanced energy portfolio, but you can't make what the UK requires.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
in energy to run our industrialized society and keep the electricity flowing all the time with wind energy or wind and solar energy. Do you feel like you're winning the argument after all these years? I think we're making slow but steady progress. I think the important thing is to keep making progress.
Presenter
Let's have another piece of music, Sue, Ian. What's next?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well the next one is an Elton John song, your song in fact, because it brings back memories from my university days when I was doing a PhD here in London. And I shared a flat with an American called Gracie and she was a passionate Elton John fan and it brought me into contact with him and his music and I've been a fan ever since.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
It's a little bit funny.
Speaker 1
This feeling inside
Speaker 1
Not one of those who can easily
Speaker 1
Don't have much money, but boy it's idiot
Speaker 1
I'd buy a big house well
Speaker 1
We both could live
Presenter
Elton John and your songs. So, Doctor Dame Sue Ian, you you got married to John in nineteen eighty, I think. Um, you know I have very much a sense of you, certainly as a young woman, of being entirely capable, very bright, ambitious, logical. Were you were you a romantic, too?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, I don't know about that. I don't know whether romantic is the right way to describe it. How did you meet?
Presenter
Um how did you m
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, we actually met at primary school.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yeah, I I was put into his class at primary school. He was actually a year above me at primary school and so he went off to the boys' grammar school and I went to the girls' grammar school. So I didn't see him again until I went to Imperial College and there was this guy sitting at the other end of the mass common room and uh he says it was the the worst catch line ever. I walked up to him and said um don't I know you from primary school?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
And did he
Presenter
He remember you? He couldn't obviously remember me as well as I could remember him. If I was to ask John, would he say that there is something of the workaholic and the obsessive in you?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yeah, he probably would.
Presenter
What are the things that you and John love doing together that are that are not about work?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, we do the sailing and the and the walking and we also ski.
Presenter
Are you better than him?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
He's probably uh less fearful than I am, so he'll go down black icy runs that I wouldn't uh contemplate.
Presenter
As somebody who's risen to the position that you have in your profession, are you a competitive person?
Presenter
I wouldn't say that I would
Dr Dame Sue Ion
was competitive, but I suppose uh I must be in some respects.
Presenter
I don't like to get things wrong. You've said if our current rates of energy production remain the same, Britain's only got well you yeah, I mean you've said five to ten years before the lights go out. So in a nutshell, if the government were to say to you here's a bit of A four paper, just write down the three things on here that we have to do to sort it.
Presenter
What would those things be?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yeah.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
to continue to give confidence to the nuclear energy sector because it's financial decisions that are affecting the journey to deployment of new ones, investors being just nervous. Will the government hold its nerve? Will the policy be consistent? So consistent policy within government.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
support for new generation of systems which are more efficient and cost less. And also to look at the other sources of energy and make sure we have a balanced portfolio so that we haven't got all our eggs in one basket.
Presenter
Let's have your seventh piece of the morning suey, and what is it?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
My seventh piece is actually the link to skiing which uh we have uh and it's uh Bruce Hornsby and the Range the way it is and it and it's because uh on one of our skiing holidays there was a fantastic pianist playing in a piano bar in Valdez Air and that was what he was playing and so every time it plays I think of ski slopes.
Speaker 2
Standing in line, marking time, waiting for the wealth they're done.
Speaker 2
Still can't buy a job
Speaker 2
A man in a silksuit hurries by as he catches the poor old lady's eyes.
Presenter
Memories for you, Sue Ian, of that Valdazaire piano bar. I can almost feel the crisp snow outside as we listen to that. That was Bruce Hornsby and The Range and The Way It Is. You once said that people who joined the nuclear industry at the time you did were either born twenty years too late or twenty years too early. What did you mean by that?
Speaker 1
The
Speaker 2
But
Speaker 1
Side.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, I guess I meant that if you joined it in the early days of nuclear energy, it was all buoyant. It was seen as the great technology. And then at the time I entered it, it was just starting its cut backs in the 1980s through to the present day. So it just seems it's been like a hard journey from the middle of the 1980s through to four or five years ago when things have really started to take off again. So anybody entering the sector now, it's a fantastic sector to work in, whether it's new generation or cleanup and waste management and decommissioning. It's just a brilliant place to work.
Presenter
You left BNFL in two thousand six and you haven't taken a full-time job since then. How is your life these days divided up?
Presenter
Well it's I seem to feel it quite
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, I do quite a bit of voluntary work for the Royal Academy of Engineering and I chair their Mac Robert Committee at the moment. That's the committee that gives a prize once a year that's a bit like the Oscars for engineering. And that's a really enjoyable job because you just get to see such a diverse range of engineering from fantastic control systems that make wind energy more efficient and the mechanical engineering that goes with it with hydraulics or breast cancer detectors. Just a fantastic range of stuff that you get to see and admire.
Presenter
When you think back to the little girl at the kitchen table with the chemistry set and the better builder brick, so you know, what w what would you say to her, knowing what you know now and having reached the height that you have?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Well, I say it to kids in school now, you know, you never know what life will bring to you. You know, I just think I've been so lucky in life. You know, one day you might be like me or like Nancy Rothwell, and so they'll generally sit and look at one another.
Presenter
And laugh, but you never know. Let's have your final piece of music then, Suty, and what are we going to hear?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
My final piece is from a group called Journey, Who's Crying Now from the album Escape. That brings back memories for me of a grand tour that John and I did of the northeastern US and Canada back in the 1980s. So it was a driving marathon and at the time this band and the song was top of the charts in North America. So it was being played every couple of hours on the radio and it was an American car with an absolutely amazing stereo system compared to the ones that we had in the UK at the time. So that's the memory that it brings back for me.
Speaker 2
Oh, there's the sad
Speaker 2
One bird.
Speaker 2
Spring now.
Speaker 2
Too hot for two rats
Speaker 2
Who be the love of war?
Speaker 2
Uh
Presenter
That's Journey and Who's Crying Now. Sue Ian, I give all my castaways, as you may know, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and they get to take their own book along too. What's your book going to be?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
I'd actually like to take the box set of Wainwright walks. These are exquisite and accurate illustrations with full descriptions of the routes of the walks in the Lake District with many of the walks that I've done over the years. And I thought that would be great to be able to look through those and have the image in my mind of the walk up through the fells in the Lake District with family and friends.
Presenter
Okay, you may just about be breaching the rules there with a box set of books. Let's imagine, shall we, that we they come in one bound volume and that we find that special volume and that we give it to you. A luxury too. What will your luxury be?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Dame Sue Ion
I'll plump for a guitar because music does mean a lot to me and I'd like to learn to play it properly. So a guitar with a set of uh music from beginner all the way up to something better.
Presenter
We shall give you a guitar. Which one of these eights would you save?
Dr Dame Sue Ion
I'd actually save the Vivaldi as long as it was the full Vivoldi and not just the uh Gloria in Excelsis snip. It's just a fantastic piece, both uplifting and other parts are contemplative. And I thought on a desert island it would be a combination of, you know,
Presenter
Joyous and contemplative. We shall give you the Vivaldi. Dr. Dame Sue Ian, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you very much indeed for having me.
Presenter
You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.
Presenter asks
Only eight percent of engineers in Britain are female. What's the problem?
Well, the problem is the lack of girls doing A level physics that's the problem. The way the subject is taught and the the topics that are within it don't appeal as much to girls as they do to boys, and also for girls that it's not cool to do physics.
Presenter asks
You were born in 1955. What was it about your upbringing and schooling that made it prejudice-free regarding engineering?
My mum and dad had uh two daughters and so we were always uh treated equally and my dad used to have us help in whatever he was doing. I was quite happy to help him dig the garden and to uh get a hammer out and a saw and he was quite happy to have me in the garage messing about with him. I can remember, you know, building a go-kart out of bits of old pram stuff that we got from a scrapyard to compete in a go-kart race down the road, yeah.
Presenter asks
When did you first come into contact with atomic energy and why did it interest you?
maybe fourth or fifth form as it was at the time at school. And it was just a topic that was on the news at the time. It was the beginning of atomic energy in the UK. And it was seen as a great, exciting, great advance for science. I thought it sounded really good, really cool.
Presenter asks
You taught in inner city comps while doing your PhD. What did you learn from the pupils about their lives?
So completely different from anything that I'd ever experienced. It was at an all-girls school, but boy, was it a tough all-girls school down between Brixton and Clapham. I can remember at the time going for an interview with the head and her saying to me, Well, we need you to teach physics from Easter, and this was February, but will you start next week and teach the first and second years maths? … And I said But I haven't done any teaching. So I went home that weekend and rang up my old headmistress and said, Help. And she opened up my old school, Pemerlam Girls' School, and sat me down and said, This is what you got to do to get by for the first couple of weeks. … It was really, really tough because they were unstreamed kids and so you had some who were actually pretty well qualified kids and you had other ones that just weren't interested in learning at all. The kids used to have to walk around with all their bags and coats and things because there wasn't adequate provision for it and the labs were very, very poorly equipped. In the end I took some stuff down from Imperial College so that we could teach physics stuff properly.
“I think many people know now that we are actually importers of oil and gas, not exporters anymore.”
“Your heart usually sinks, but then you have to look at the facts.”
“The problem is the lack of girls doing A level physics that's the problem.”
“If you don't actually make or do things in an applied sense, you just lose the feel and the sense of what it's all about.”
“It was really, really tough because they were unstreamed kids and so you had some who were actually pretty well qualified kids and you had other ones that just weren't interested in learning at all.”
“I'd actually like to take the box set of Wainwright walks.”