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Nuclear site in Cumbria, England
Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. Former activities included nuclear power generation from 1956 to 2003, and nuclear fuel reprocessing from 1952 to 2022.2 It is headquartered in Risley.1 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0
Last updated Oct 21, 2026.
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Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. Former activities included nuclear power generation from 1956 to 2003, and nuclear fuel reprocessing from 1952 to 2022.2
John Dunster Memorial Lecture at SRP annual conference 2017, by Prof R Wakeford. Includes radiological aspects of Windscale Fire
An article on the Windscale fire, by the Lake District Tourist Board
Nuclear Tourist
BBC retrospective on the accident report
Board of Inquiry Report
From Wikipedia’s article on Sellafield, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3
The site was established with the creation of Royal Ordnance Factory ROF Sellafield by the Ministry of Supply in 1942; built by John Laing & Son at the hamlet of Low Sellafield. The nearby sister factory, ROF Drigg, had been constructed in 1940, 3 miles (5 km) to the south-east near the village of Drigg. Both sites were classed as Explosive ROFs, producing high-explosive at ROF Drigg, and propellant at ROF Sellafield. They were built in this location to be remote from large centres of population because of the hazardous nature of the process, and to reduce the risk of World War II enemy air attack. There were also existing rail links, and a good supply of high quality water from Wastwater. Production ceased at both factories immediately following the defeat of Japan.
Following the decision taken by the British government in January 1947 to develop nuclear weapons, Sellafield was chosen as the location of the plutonium production plant, consisting of the Windscale Piles and accompanying reprocessing plant to separate plutonium from the spent nuclear fuel. Unlike the early US nuclear reactors at Hanford, which consisted of a graphite core cooled by water, the Windscale Piles consisted of a graphite core cooled by air. Each pile contained almost 2,000 tonnes (1,968 L/T) of graphite, and measured over 7.3 metres (24 ft) high by 15.2 metres (50 ft) in diameter. Fuel for the reactor consisted of rods of uranium metal, approximately 30 cm (12 inches) long by 2.5 cm (0.98 inches) in diameter, and clad in aluminium.
The initial fuel was loaded into the Windscale Piles in July 1950. By July 1952 the separation plant was being used to separate plutonium and uranium from spent fuel.
On 10 October 1957, the Windscale Piles were shut down following a fire in Pile 1 during a scheduled graphite annealing procedure. The fire badly damaged the pile core and released an estimated 750 terabecquerels (20,000 curies) of radioactive material, including 22 TBq of Cs-137 and 740 TBq of I-131 into the shafts. Thanks to innovative filters installed by Nobel laureate Sir John Cockcroft 95% of the material was captured. As a precautionary measure, milk from surrounding farming areas was destroyed. However, no residents from the surrounding area were evacuated or informed of the danger of the radiation leakage. It is now believed that there have been 100 to 240 cancer deaths as a result of the release of radioactive material. Following the fire, Pile 1 was unserviceable, and Pile 2, although undamaged by the fire, was shut down as a precaution.
In the 1990s, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority started to implement plans to decommission, disassemble and clean up both piles. In 2004, Pile 1 still contained about 15 tonnes (14.76 L/T) of uranium fuel, and final completion of the decommissioning is not expected until at least 2037.
In 2014, radioactive sludge in the Pile Fuel Storage Pond (PFSP), built between 1948 and 1952, started to be repackaged in drums to reduce the "sludge hazard" and to allow the pond to be decommissioned. Decommissioning will require retrieval of sludge and solids, prior to dewatering and deconstruction, with retrievals planned for completion in 2016.
The first generation reprocessing plant was built to extract the plutonium from spent fuel to provide fissile material for the UK's atomic weapons programme, and for exchange with the United States through the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement.
The Butex process was used (a forerunner to the more efficient Purex process) and the plant operated from 1951 until 1964, with an annual capacity of 300 tonnes (295 L/T) of pile spent fuel, or 750 tonnes (738 L/T) of low burn-up fuel. It was first used to reprocess fuel from the Windscale Piles but was later repurposed to process fuel from UK Magnox reactors. Following the commissioning of the dedicated Magnox Reprocessing Plant, it became a pre-handling plant to allow oxide fuel to be reprocessed in the Magnox reprocessing plant. It was closed in 1973 after a violent reaction within the plant contaminated the entire plant and 34 workers with ruthenium-106.
In 1964, the Magnox reprocessing plant came on stream to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from the national Magnox reactor fleet. The plant used the "plutonium uranium extraction" (Purex) method for reprocessing spent fuel, with tributyl phosphate in odourless kerosene and nitric acid as extraction agents. The Purex process produces uranium, plutonium and fission products as separated chemical output streams.
Magnox fuel has to be reprocessed in a timely fashion since the cladding corrodes if stored underwater, and routes for dry storage have not yet been proven, so it has been necessary to keep the plant running to process all the Magnox fuel inventory.
Magnox fuel reprocessing ceased on 17 July 2022, when the reprocessing plant completed its last batch of fuel after 58 years of operation. A total of 55,000 tonnes of fuel had been processed during those years.
This was built to support reprocessing of fuel from UK Magnox power stations through the Magnox Reprocessing Plant. It was initially planned to be used to keep fuel rods in for three months before they were reprocessed, but was used for operations between 1959 until 1985. The pond is 20 m (66 ft) wide, 150 m (490 ft) long and 6 m (20 ft) deep. Originally called B30 (and nicknamed 'Dirty 30'), the pond was renamed in 2018.
As of 2014, the FGMSP remains as a priority decommissioning project. As well as nuclear waste, the pond holds about 1,200 cubic metres (42,000 cu ft) of radioactive sludge of unknown characteristics and 14,000 cubic metres (490,000 cu ft) of contaminated water. Decommissioning requires retrieval of the radioactive sludge into a newly built Sludge Packaging Plant, as well as fuel and skip retrieval. Completion of this will allow the dewatering and dismantling of the remaining structure.
Future work will immobilise the sludge for long-term storage, and process solids through the Fuel Handling Plant for treatment and storage.
The Magnox Swarf Storage Silo is a large building on the Sellafield Site which contains intermediate level fuel cladding swarf waste arising from reprocessing Magnox reactor fuel. Once expended fuel was removed from the Magnox reactors, the magnesium cladding was removed prior to the chemical processing of the fuel rod. To accomplish this, the fuel can was fed through a machine known as a "decanner" which stripped the cladding off the inner rod creating the swarf of broken magnesium alloy cladding as a waste product.
Since the start of commercial Magnox reprocessing in 1964 (the same year MSSS began operations), this waste was deposited into individual water-filled compartments within the MSSS. As they became full, more were added between the 1960s and 1983 totalling 22 compartments. In the early 1990s, the wet storage of this waste was no longer seen as the most effective way to store the material, and in later years was replaced with a dry storage method. The long-term storage and subsequent degradation of the magnesium alloy swarf in water causes an exothermic reaction which releases hydrogen gas. Normal operating procedures and overall design of the silo allowed for hydrogen gas to be safely vented before it could accumulate, and the heat can be removed through re-circulation of the water. The Magnox Swarf Storage Silo ceased being filled in 2000.
Many of the historic Sellafield operating practices have been superseded by better and safer alternatives. Consequently, since 2000 the Magnox Encapsulation Plant on site has been responsible for the safe processing and dry storage of Magnox cladding swarf. This still left the problem of removing waste material that has been stored in hazardous conditions in the MSSS. To accomplish this complex task, Sellafield Ltd has partnered with commercial firms to design, construct and operate a remotely operated waste retrieval facility called the Silo Emptying Plant (SEP). This is designed to retrieve waste from the MSSS which will be processed in other specially designed site facilities, and then placed in interim storage at Sellafield. Longer term it is hoped such waste would be consigned to a deep geological repository for permanent storage. The radioactive inventory and lack of modern standards in the silo has made it the most complicated and highest-priority mission in the NDA estate nationally.
Preparations for removing the 11,000m3 of historic waste from the silos and storing safely have taken over 20 years.
On 10 June 2022, Sellafield Ltd announced the commencement of waste retrievals which will take approximately 20 years. Once this radiological hazard has been removed, the MSSS structure can be demolished.
Calder Hall was first connected to the grid on 27 August 1956 and officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 17 October 1956. It was the world's first nuclear power station to provide electricity on a commercial scale to a public grid.
The Calder Hall design was codenamed PIPPA (Pressurised Pile Producing Power and Plutonium) by the UKAEA to denote the plant's dual commercial and military role. Construction started in 1953. Calder Hall had four Magnox reactors capable of generating 60 MWe (net) of power each, reduced to 50 MWe in 1973. The reactors also supplied steam to the whole site for process and other purposes. The reactors were supplied by UKAEA, the turbines by C. A. Parsons and Company, and the civil engineering contractor was Taylor Woodrow Construction.
In its early life Calder Hall primarily produced weapons-grade plutonium, with two fuel loads per year; electricity production was a secondary purpose. From 1964 it was mainly used on commercial fuel cycles; in April 1995 the UK Government announced that all production of plutonium for weapons purposes had ceased.
The station was closed on 31 March 2003, the first reactor having been in use for nearly 47 years. decommissioning started in 2005. The plant should be in save storage, called "care and maintenance" (C&M), by 2027 or later.
Calder Hall had four cooling towers, each 88 metres (289 ft) in height, which were highly visible landmarks. Plans for a museum involving renovating Calder Hall and preserving the towers were formulated, but the costs were too high. The cooling towers were demolished by controlled implosions on 29 September 2007. A period of 12 weeks was required to remove asbestos in the towers' rubble.
The WAGR was a prototype for the UK's second generation of reactors, the advanced gas-cooled reactor or AGR, which followed on from the Magnox stations. The station had a rated thermal output of approximately 100 MW and 30 MWe. The WAGR spherical containment, known colloquially as the "golfball", is one of the iconic buildings on the site. Construction was carried out by Mitchell Construction and completed in 1962. This reactor was shut down in 1983, and was subsequently the subject of a pilot project to demonstrate techniques for safely decommissioning a nuclear reactor.
Between 1977 and 1978 an inquiry, chaired by Mr Justice Parker, was held into an application by BNFL for outline planning permission to build a new plant to reprocess irradiated oxide nuclear fuel from both UK and foreign reactors. The inquiry was used to answer three questions:
"1. Should oxide fuel from United Kingdom reactors be reprocessed in this country at all; whether at Windscale or elsewhere?2. If yes, should such reprocessing be carried on at Windscale?3. If yes, should the reprocessing plant be about double the estimated site required to handle United Kingdom oxide fuels and be used as to the spare capacity, for reprocessing foreign fuels?"The result of the inquiry was that the new plant, the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) was given the go ahead in 1978, although it did not go into operation until 1994.
In 2003, it was announced that THORP would be closed in 2010, but this was later extended to 2018 to allow completion of agreed contracts. Originally predicted to make profits for BNFL of £500 million, by 2003 it had made losses of over £1 billion. THORP was closed for almost two years from 2005, after a leak had been undetected for nine months. Production eventually restarted at the plant in early 2008, but almost immediately had to be put on hold again, as an underwater lift that takes the fuel for reprocessing needed to be repaired.
On 14 November 2018 it was announced that operations had ended at THORP. The facility will be used to store spent nuclear fuel until the 2070s.
Highly Active Liquor Evaporation and Storage (HALES) is a department at Sellafield. It conditions nuclear waste streams from the Magnox and Thorp reprocessing plants, prior to transfer to the Waste Vitrification Plant.
In 1990 the Waste Vitrification Plant (WVP), which seals high-level radioactive waste in glass, was opened. In this plant, liquid wastes are mixed with glass and melted in a furnace, which when cooled forms a solid block of glass.
The plant has three process lines and is based on the French AVM procedure. The plant was built with two lines, commissioned during 1989, with a third added in 2002. The principal item is an inductively heated melting furnace, in which the calcined waste is mixed with glass frit (fragments of smashed glass) The melt is poured into waste containers which are welded shut, allowed to cool slowly in a heater to facilitate a monolithic product (single large block of glass with minimal cracks or small crystals to facilitate long term stability), their outsides decontaminated in WVP, then again in the connected building Residue Export Facility (REF), and then placed in the air-cooled Vitrified Product Store.
This storage consists of 800 vertical storage tubes each capable of storing ten containers. The total storage capacity is 8000 containers, and 6000 containers had been stored by 2016.
Vitrification should ensure safe storage of waste in the UK for the medium- to long-term, with the objective of eventual placement in a deep geological repository. As of 2007 studies of durability and leach rates were being carried out.
Construction of the Sellafield MOX fuel Plant (SMP) was completed in 1997, and operations began in October 2001. Although designed with a production capacity of 120 tonnes/year, the plant achieved a total output of only 5 tonnes during its first five years of operation. Consequently, in 2008 orders for the plant had to be fulfilled at COGEMA in France, and the plant was reported in the media as "failed" with a total construction and operating cost by 2009 of £1.2 billion. On 12 May 2010, an agreement was reached with existing Japanese customers on future MOX supplies.
In July 2010 Areva was contracted to design and supply a new rod line to improve reliability and production rate. However, on 3 August 2011 the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority announced that the MOX Plant would close, due to the loss of the Japanese orders following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The NDA stated that the plant "had suffered many years of disappointing performance", and it was reported that the total cost to date had been £1.4 billion. Although Japanese orders for MOX fuel re-commenced on 17 April 2013, they were supplied from France by COGEMA.
Since its early days, Sellafield has discharged low-level radioactive waste into the sea, using a flocculation process to remove radioactivity from liquid effluent before discharge. Metals dissolved in acidic effluents were made to produce a metal hydroxide flocculant precipitate following the addition of ammonium hydroxide. The suspension was then transferred to settling tanks where the precipitate would settle out, and the remaining clarified liquid, or supernate, would be discharged to the Irish Sea. As an improvement to that process, in 1994 the Enhanced Actinide Removal Plant (EARP) became operational. In EARP the effectiveness of the process is enhanced by the addition of reagents to remove the remaining soluble radioactive species. EARP was enhanced further in 2004 to further reduce the quantities of technetium-99 released to the environment.
Sellafield has several radioactive waste stores, mostly working on an interim basis while a deep geological repository plan is developed and implemented.
The stores include:
Legacy Ponds and Silos – Storage of historic waste
Sludge packaging plant – Treatment and interim storage of sludges from legacy ponds
Sellafield product and residue store – Site store for plutonium and plutonium residues – The civil plutonium stockpile stood at 140 tonnes at the ending of reprocessing in 2022.
Engineered drum stores – Site stores for plutonium-contaminated material
Encapsulated product stores – Site stores for grouted wastes
Vitrified product store – Vitrified high level waste
The UK's main Low Level Waste Repository for nuclear waste is 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) south east of Sellafield at Drigg. A paper published in 1989 said that 70% of the waste received at Drigg originated from Sellafield.
Fellside Power Station is a 168 MWe CHP gas-fired power station adjacent to the Sellafield site, which it supplies with process and heating steam. It is run as Fellside Heat and Power Ltd, is wholly owned by Sellafield Ltd and is operated & managed by PX Ltd. It was built in 1993, in anticipation of the closure of the Calder Hall generating station, which supplied these services.
The station uses three General Electric Frame 6001B gas turbines, with power entering the National Grid via a 132 kV transformer. The turbines at Fellside are normally natural gas fired but are also able to run on distillate (diesel) fuel.
In May 2023, Sellafield Ltd removed a set of large, now redundant steel tanks at the Fellside power station. Their original purpose has been fulfilled by newer tanks.
The Central Laboratory at Sellafield is the headquarters of the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL). It supports newly built reactors, operation of reactors, operations of fuel processing plants and decommissioning and clean-up. The NNL's Central Laboratory can undertake a wide range of radioactive and non-radioactive experimental programmes.
It undertakes a wide range of analytical services, with customers ranging from Government and the NDA to site licence companies, utilities, nuclear specialists and universities. Smaller experiments are undertaken at Sellafield and larger experiments and rigs are assembled off site, in non-radioactive areas prior to active testing in a radioactive setting.
From Wikipedia’s article on Sellafield, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3
Between 1950 and 2000, there were 21 serious incidents or accidents involving off-site radiological releases that warranted a rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale, one at level 5, five at level 4 and fifteen at level 3. During the 1950s and 1960s there were protracted periods of known, deliberate discharges to the atmosphere of plutonium and irradiated uranium oxide particulates.
In the effort to build the independent British nuclear weapon in the 1940s and 1950s, diluted radioactive waste was discharged by pipeline into the Irish Sea. Greenpeace claims that the Irish Sea remains one of the most heavily contaminated seas in the world because of these discharges. Ocean scientist David Assinger has challenged this general suggestion, and cites the Dead Sea as the most radioactive sea in the world. The Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR Convention) reports an estimated 200 kg (440 lb) of plutonium has been deposited in the marine sediments of the Irish Sea.
Most of the area's long-lived radioactive technetium came from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel at the Sellafield facility. Technetium-99 is a radioactive element which is produced by nuclear fuel reprocessing, and also as a by-product of medical facilities (for example Ireland is responsible for the discharge of approximately 11 grams or 6.78 gigabecquerels of technetium-99 each year despite not having a nuclear industry).
Because it is almost uniquely produced by nuclear fuel reprocessing, technetium-99 is an important element as part of the OSPAR Convention since it provides a good tracer for discharges into the sea. In itself, the technetium discharges do not represent a significant radiological hazard, and in 2000, a study noted "...that in the most recently reported dose estimates for the most exposed Sellafield group of seafood consumers (FSA/SEPA 2000), the contributions from technetium-99 and actinide nuclides from Sellafield (<100 μSv) was less than that from 210Po attributable to discharges from the Whitehaven phosphate fertiliser plant and probably less than the dose from naturally occurring background levels of 210Po."
Because of the need to comply with the OSPAR Convention, British Nuclear Group commissioned a new process in which technetium-99 was removed from the waste stream and vitrified in glass blocks in the new Vitrification Plant on site.
Discharges into the sea of radioactive effluents – mainly caesium-137 – from Sellafield amounted to 5200 TBq during the peak year, 1975.
In 1983 radioactive discharges to sea containing ruthenium and rhodium-106, both beta-emitting isotopes, resulted in temporary warnings against swimming in the sea along a 10-mile (16 km) stretch of coast between St. Bees and Eskmeals.
BNFL received a fine of £10,000 for this discharge. 1983 was also the year in which Yorkshire Television produced a documentary "Windscale: The Nuclear Laundry", which claimed that the low levels of radioactivity that are associated with waste streams from nuclear plants such as Sellafield did pose a non-negligible risk.
The Windscale fire of October 1957 stands as the most severe incident in the history of the Sellafield site. This event, rated at level 5 out of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, ranks among the world's most significant nuclear accidents, with only three events having received higher ratings. The incident involved a fire in the Windscale Piles, facilities used for plutonium production, which resulted in a substantial release of radioactive fallout into the environment.
The consequences of this event were far-reaching. Surrounding agricultural areas, particularly dairy farms, experienced radioactive contamination. Of notable concern was the release of significant quantities of the iodine-131 isotope, a known contributor to thyroid cancer risk. The scale and impact of this incident have made it a subject of ongoing study and discussion in the field of nuclear safety.
The UK government downplayed the events for some time and the original reports on the fire were subject to heavy censorship, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan feared the incident would harm British-American nuclear relations. It has since come to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were also released, though knowledge of this was excluded from government reports until 1983.
The Windscale fire remains Britain's worst nuclear accident. The release would have been much worse if it had not been for the filter at the top of the Pile's exhaust chimney.
A 1988 UK government estimate stated that 100 people "probably" died as a result of exposure to the radioactive fallout from the Windscale fire. In 2007, the 50th anniversary of the fire, an academic study concluded that the amount of radioactive fallout released was twice the existing estimates and it spread further east than thought. The study estimated that 240 people were given cancer in the surrounding areas, and that 100 of these cancer cases were fatal. However, later epidemiological studies failed to find any such increase. A 2024 study ascribed the lack of any increase in detected cancer rates as potentially being due to the prompt ban on consumption of milk from the area, and criticised previous estimates as lacking a firm evidentiary basis.
On 24 August 1970, a criticality incident occurred in the Plutonium Recovery Plant.
The plant recovered plutonium from miscellaneous sources and was considered tightly controlled. Plutonium was dissolved and transferred into a solvent extraction column through a transfer vessel and backflow trap. Unexpectedly, 2.15 kg (4.7 lb) of plutonium had accumulated in the transfer vessel and backflow trap and become just sub-critical. As an organic solvent was added to the aqueous solution in the vessel, the organic and aqueous phases separated out with the organic layer on top. This solvent extracted plutonium from the aqueous solution with sufficient concentration and geometry to create a criticality.
Two plant workers were exposed to radiation.
Due to algae forming in the pond and a buildup of radioactive sludge, it was impossible to determine exactly how much radioactive waste was stored in the FGMSP. British authorities had not been able to provide the Euratom inspectors with precise data and the European Commission took action against Great Britain in the European Court of Justice in 2004. According to Greenpeace there was an expected 1300 kg of plutonium, 400 kg of which was in mud sediments.
Radiation around the pool could get so high that a person was not allowed to stay more than 2 minutes, seriously affecting decommissioning. The pool was not watertight; time and weather had created cracks in the concrete, letting contaminated water leak. In 2014 photographs of the storage ponds were leaked to the media, showing they were in poor condition with cracked concrete, vegetation growing amongst machinery and seagulls bathing in the pools.
The MOX Demonstration Facility was a small-scale plant to produce commercial quality MOX fuel for light water reactors. The plant was commissioned between 1992 and 1994, and until 1999 produced fuel for use in Switzerland, Germany and Japan.
In 1999 it was discovered that the plant's staff had been falsifying quality assurance data since 1996. A Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) investigation concluded four of the five work-shifts were involved in the falsification, though only one worker admitted to falsifying data, and that "the level of control and supervision... had been virtually non-existent.". The NII stated that the safety performance of the fuel was not affected as there was also a primary automated check on the fuel. Nevertheless, "in a plant with the proper safety culture, the events described in this report could not have happened" and there were systematic failures in management.
BNFL had to pay compensation to the Japanese customer, Kansai Electric, and take back a flawed shipment of MOX fuel from Japan. BNFL's Chief Executive John Taylor resigned, after initially resisting resignation when the NII's damning report was published.
On 17 February 2005, the UK Atomic Energy Authority reported that 29.6 kilograms (65 lb) of plutonium was unaccounted for in auditing records at the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. The operating company, the British Nuclear Group, described this as a discrepancy in paper records and not as indicating any physical loss of material. They pointed out that the error amounted to about 0.5%, whereas International Atomic Energy Agency regulations permit a discrepancy up to 1% as the amount of plutonium recovered from the reprocessing process never precisely matches the pre-process estimates.
The inventories in question were accepted as satisfactory by Euratom, the relevant regulatory agency.
In 2000, wires on six robotic arms that moved vitrified glass blocks were deliberately cut by staff, putting the vitrification plant out of operation for three days.
On 19 April 2005, around 83,000 litres (18,000 imperial gallons; 22,000 US gallons) of hot nitric acid containing dissolved radioisotopes was discovered to have leaked in the THORP reprocessing plant from a cracked pipe into a huge stainless steel-lined concrete sump built to contain leaks.
A discrepancy between the amount of material entering and exiting the THORP processing system had first been noted in August 2004. Operations staff did not discover the leak until safeguards staff reported the discrepancies. Nineteen tonnes of uranium and 160 kg (350 lb) of plutonium dissolved in nitric acid has been pumped from the sump vessel into a holding tank.
No radiation was released to the environment, and no one was injured by the incident, but because of the large escape of radioactivity to the secondary containment the incident was given an International Nuclear Event Scale level 3 categorisation. Sellafield Limited was fined £500,000 for breaching health and safety law. In January 2007, Sellafield was given consent to restart THORP.
In 2007, an inquiry was launched into the removal of tissue from a total of 65 dead nuclear workers, some of whom worked at Sellafield. It has been alleged that the tissue was removed without seeking permission from the relatives of the late workers. Michael Redfern QC was appointed to lead the investigation. At the same time The Observer revealed that official documents showed that during the 1960s volunteer workers at Sellafield had participated in secret Cold War experiments to assess the biological effect of exposure to radioactive substances, such as from ingesting caesium-134.
The inquiry final report was published in November 2010, reporting that "...body parts had been removed between 1961 and 1992. The deaths of 76 workers – 64 from Sellafield and 12 from other UK nuclear plants – were examined, although the scope of the inquiry was later significantly widened." The person behind this scheme was Dr Geoffrey Schofield, who became BNFL's Company chief medical officer, and who died in 1985. Sellafield staff did not breach any legal obligation, did not consider their actions untoward, and published the scientific information obtained in peer-reviewed scientific journals. It was the hospital pathologists, who were profoundly ignorant of the law, who breached the Human Tissue Act 1961 by giving Sellafield human organs, without any consents, under an informal arrangement.
In December 2023, it emerged that Sellafield was the victim of cyber hacking by groups closely linked to Russia and China It was first reported by UK newspaper The Guardian, it is unknown if the malware has yet been eradicated. It is still unknown to the extent of the attack and what the long term effects are.
The Guardian has since reported that the Sellafield site has a "worsening leak from a huge silo of radioactive waste" that is likely to continue until 2050. The silo in question is the Magnox swarf storage silo and it was reported that scientists were still trying to estimate the risk to the public using statistical modelling.
From Wikipedia’s article on Sellafield, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3
The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.
