Sellafield aerial view. © BNFL

Sellafield is a village near the coast of the Irish Sea in Cumbria, England, close to the village and railway station of Seascale.

Sellafield is also the name of a nearby site owned by British Nuclear Fuels Limited that houses the Calder Hall Magnox nuclear power station, other nuclear reactors, and an installation for processing spent nuclear fuel. The site has been the subject of much controversy because of accidental discharges and alleged deliberate discharges of radioactive material into the Irish Sea. For example, in his 1986 book The Worst accident in the world : Chernobyl, the end of the nuclear dream, Nigel Hawkes estimates that about 250 kg of plutonium have been deposited in the marine sediments surrounding the site during its lifetime. The plant is also controversial because it is thought that its role will lead to the area being used as a "dumping ground" for unwanted nuclear material by nuclear programmes over all the world.

The Sellafield site is built on land that was formerly part of the Windscale nuclear site (named after another nearby village). Windscale was owned by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, but when part of it was transferred to the ownership of British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the transferred part was renamed "Sellafield". The remainder remains in the hands of the UKAEA and is still called Windscale.

In 1957, there was a fire (known as the Windscale fire) at one of the twin Windscale reactors there, which was considered the world's worst nuclear accident until the Chernobyl accident. Produce, especially milk, from the surrounding farming areas had to be destroyed. An estimated 750 terabecquerels (TBq) (20,000 curies) of (radioactive material were released. (For comparison, 250,000 terabecquerels or 250 petabecquerels (7 million curies) were released by Chernobyl, and only 0.55 terabecquerels (15 curies) by Three Mile Island).

The air-cooled, graphite-moderated Windscale reactors were the first British weapons grade plutonium 239 production facility built for the British nuclear weapons program in the late 40s and the 50s. In the hasty effort building the 'British Bomb', radioactive waste was simply pipelined out into the Irish Sea, which is still some of the most heavily contaminated water in the world. Some studies have shown a leukaemia pocket in the surrounding villages (though their findings are disputed) and it has been shown that cattle and fish are contaminated with plutonium-239 and caesium-137, originating from the contaminated sediments.

Windscale was also the site of the prototype British Advanced gas-cooled reactor. This reactor was shut down in 1981, and is now part of a pilot project to demonstrate techniques for safely decommissioning a nuclear reactor.

In addition to Sellafield, some studies have recorded leukemia clusters around the nuclear weapons plants at Atomic Weapons Establishment, Aldermaston and Burghfield, though their findings are also disputed.

An equivalent site in France is in La Hague.

References

• The Worst accident in the world : Chernobyl, the end of the nuclear dream, by Nigel Hawkes, Pan Books : W. Heinemann (1986), ISBN 0330297430

See also

• Windscale fire
• List of cancer clusters
• List of nuclear accidents
• List of nuclear reactors

External links

• British Nuclear Fuels Limited (http://www.bnfl.com)
• An article on the Windscale fire, by the Lake District Tourist Board (http://www.lakestay.co.uk/1957.htm)
• Nuclear Tourist (http://www.nucleartourist.com/events/windscal.htm)
• BBC retrospective on the accident report (http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/8/newsid_3181000/3181342.stm)
• All about Sellafield (http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/nuclear/sellafield/wp_5-2001/index.html)
• The present day Windscale site (http://www.ukaea.org.uk/windscale/)
• Project WAGR (http://www.ukaea.org.uk/wagr/index.htm) to safely decommission the AGR at Sellafield