Who built Sellafield?

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, 5 km to the south-east near the village of Drigg.

How radioactive is Sellafield?

The Thorp nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, Cumbria, has recycled its final batch of reactor fuel. Inside the Head End Shear Cave, where nuclear fuel rods were extracted from their casings and cut into pieces before being dissolved in heated nitric acid, the radiation level is 280 sieverts per hour.

When was the Sellafield leak?

Sellafield incident report – Water leak – 1 March 2018 As a result, water ran into nearby pipe trenches below ground level. The volume of water resulted in a discharge through a number of non-routine routes, including a leakage to ground.

What was Sellafield previously called?

Work started on the Sellafield site – which was renamed Windscale – in 1947. It took more than 5,300 construction workers, engineers and architects less than five years to design and build a fully operational nuclear facility.

What is Sellafield’s B30?

Photograph: Robert Brook/Alamy/Alamy Building B30 is a large, stained, concrete edifice that stands at the centre of Sellafield, Britain’s sprawling nuclear processing plant in Cumbria.

What is the main activity at Sellafield?

Sellafield is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. Current key activities (2019) include nuclear fuel reprocessing, nuclear waste storage and nuclear decommissioning, and it is a former nuclear power generating site.

Is Sellafield’s B30 reactor a’slow-motion Chernobyl’?

The disused plutonium reactors at Sellafield are a ‘slow-motion Chernobyl’, according to Greenpeace campaigners against nuclear energy. Photograph: Robert Brook/Alamy/Alamy Building B30 is a large, stained, concrete edifice that stands at the centre of Sellafield, Britain’s sprawling nuclear processing plant in Cumbria.

What happened to B38 at Sellafield?

Cladding and fuel were simply thrown into B38’s cooling ponds and left to disintegrate. But the building, like so many other elderly edifices at Sellafield, is crumbling and engineers now face the headache of dealing with its lethal contents.