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Dounreay Retirement Fellowship
Some eighty members of the Dounreay Retirement Fellowship recently visited Dounreay. For many, it was a first-time return since they retired, some as long as twenty years ago. Sandy McWhirter, Dounreay Programme Manager, gave a presentation on the work required to complete the decommissioning of the site. “I can appreciate if many of you see the current workforce as destroying what you created. I see it slightly differently in that you were set a critical task by the government of the day and by your skills you achieved that objective. We have been set an equally demanding task and we must emulate your achievement by demonstrating our skills.”

The group was shown round the site where they saw visible evidence of the decommissioning programme, and where many were able to point to the facility in which they had spent much of their working life. One man who is delighted that UKAEA, Dounreay has continued their apprentice training scheme is Jimmy Crossan, who came to Dounreay in 1956, and was apprentice training manager for eleven years until he retired in 1985. “I will always be proud to be associated with the scheme that provided such first class training and enriched the lives of so many young people.”

With delight in his voice he recalled attending a training conference in London when one of the speakers, a shipping superintendent, spoke very highly of the apprentice training scheme provided at Dounreay. Seeking him out afterwards the speaker told Jimmy how one of their ships had broken down in the Red Sea and the part required would take six weeks to fabricate and deliver to the ship. “The shipping superintendent said that on hearing this a young engineer volunteered to fabricate a make-shift part, and within four hours the ship was on the move again. The superintendent told me the engineer had served his apprenticeship at Dounreay.”

Before leaving site, the group were served a buffet lunch.