Spent fuel management - what’s the plan at Sellafield?

This expertise started with the operation of the Windscale Reactors and the First Generation Reprocessing plant in support of the atomic bomb and continued through the operation of Calder Hall and the reprocessing of Magnox fuel.


The creation of the Thorp reprocessing plant in the 1980s/90s meant that Sellafield could also safely manage and recycle oxide fuel from UK and overseas customers, separating out materials that could be used to produce new fuel. The fabrication of MOX fuel at Sellafield came to an end in 2011 with the closure of the Sellafield MOX Plant. Despite these many steps, nuclear is one of the cleanest forms of power generation technologies.

Decommissioning the site will take us more than 100 years and there is much that we still don’t know. Every day we are building greater certainty and we will be the generation that makes demonstrable progress in cleaning up the site.