One of Her Majesty's Government's most embarrassing failures in British industrial history


How's this for timing? A week ago The Daily Telegraph published a confidential cable from the US embassy calling a controversial plant at Sellafield "one of Her Majesty's Government's most embarrassing failures in British industrial history". Then, within days, ministers said they were minded to build another one like it.

The embassy was not wrong. The so-called Mox plant, which makes nuclear fuel out of uranium and plutonium at the Cumbrian nuclear complex, is not just – as the cable put it – a "white elephant", but one that could well go rogue. Built at a cost of £473 million, despite repeated warnings that it would be uneconomic and could be a security risk, it has never worked properly. Supposed to churn out a grand total of 560 tons of fuel by the end of its first decade of operation, later this year, it has so far produced just 15. More in The Daily Telegraph.

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Slik skapte Johs. og Per-Kaare historie

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What is at Sellafield?

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Two 'Windscale Piles', reactors built in the 1940s to produce plutonium for British nuclear weapons and for the civil nuclear power programme. The first British nuclear bomb, exploded in 1952, used plutonium from Windscale. They were opened in 1951. One of them went on fire in 1957, when 400,000 curies of radioactivity were released to the atmosphere and 2 million litres of milk were dumped. The loss of life was officially estimated in 1982 as 32 and unofficially in 1990 as over 1000. This fire was linked rightly or wrongly to cases of Down's Syndrome in Dundalk. The Pile which went on fire could not be re-opened and the other one was also closed for reasons of safety. They are being gradually dismantled, but this is not expected to be completed before 2050 because of the amount of radioactivity involved.
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