More about the English Lakes

Sellafield

In this green and pleasant Cumbrian landscape where Wasdale and Eskdale meet the sea there has grown up a vast nuclear complex-Sellafield.
It employs well over 7,000 people and was deliberately sited beyond the western Lakeland mountains because there was thought to be a slight chance it might be dangerous.
'Sellafield holds the largest stock of untreated nuclear waste on earth. 140 tonnes of plutonium. employs 10,000 people and expensive clean up will cost £90 billion and take more than 100 years.' FT 6/2/2022
The vast site embraces: Britain's first two plutonium producing reactors(now being dismantled), the world's first four commercial nuclear reactors,(all reactors now disused) a defunct AGR reactor, two nuclear fuel reprocessing plants (Thorp and B205 Magnox) , Britain's main plutonium stockpile, a MOX plant that has rarely worked to its specifications and acres of high and intermediate level nuclear waste stores. There is a high probability that industry plans will also excavate a deep underground dump for high level nuclear waste somewhere in the Western Lakes, close to Sellafield.
For a number of years Sellafield had a Visitor Centre that gave a pleasant upbeat view of how Sellafield sees the world.

The "Hot" Environment & Plans in 2009 to make it Hotter! Plutonium 1957 Top Secret Reprocessing Moorside

2017: The North Korean connection.. The British Magnox nuclear plant design which was primarily built as a military plutonium production factory provided the blueprint for the North Korean military plutonium production program too! Here is what a Conservative minister, Douglas Hogg told former Labor MP, Llew Smith, in a written parliamentary reply on 25 May 1994:"We do not know whether North Korea has drawn on plans of British reactors in the production of its own reactors. North Korea possesses a graphite moderated reactor which, while much smaller, has generic similarities to the reactors operated by British Nuclear Fuels plc. However, design information of these British reactors is not classified and has appeared in technical journals." � Lakeland earmarked as most likely site for UK's nuclear waste caverns Ecologist Magazine report on BBC4 documentary on Sellafield

To find out more about Sellafield, the following web sites may be helpful.

Sellafield Sites website

The costs of decommisioning nuclear reactors (�10 billion per reactor)

Cumbrian campaigning group CORE

web site for MAFF Fisheries Laboratories which studies Sellafield's sea pollution levels around our coasts

West Cumbria Site Stakeholder meetings

Russia's version of Sellafield.

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