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Introduction
The Sellafield site is located to the west of the Lake District on the Irish Sea coastline, 11 kilometres south of the town of Whitehaven. The site covers an area of approximately 3 square kilometres and is one of the largest nuclear engineering centres in the world. The site was originally developed in the early 1940s as a Royal Ordnance factory producing explosives for the war effort away from the main threat of air attack. After the war, the site was chosen to be the location for the United Kingdom's first nuclear reactors and associated chemical plants producing plutonium due to its comparative remoteness, coastal position, existing infrastructure and access to plentiful water supplies.
Work began in 1947 on the construction of two reactors known as the Windscale Piles along with a separation plant to extract the plutonium needed for the UK atomic weapons programme.
Recognising that atomic energy could be harnessed for commercial as well as military uses, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) was formed and the scope of work at the site expanded with the commissioning of the world’s first nuclear power plant, Calder Hall in 1956 and the development of two generations of plants for reprocessing commercial reactor Magnox and Oxide fuels. With the expansion of commercial work in nuclear energy, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) was formed in 1971 out of UKAEA as an organisation capable of preparing nuclear fuel, enriching it and fabricating it and also equipped with the facilities for processing irradiated fuels. Under the direction of BNFL, Sellafield's role in advancing the economic use of nuclear energy developed in parallel with the UK's nuclear energy requirements. Current operations at Sellafield include treatment of fuels removed from nuclear power stations, Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication and storage of nuclear materials and radioactive wastes www.sellafieldsites.com
The area around the Magnox reprocessing plants and the older production plants in the centre of the site is known as the ‘Separation Area’. This area was greatly expanded in the mid 1960s but has not been significantly altered since. Part of the Separation Area lies adjacent to a separate licensed area of 14 hectares (35 acres) called the Windscale site that contains the original Windscale Piles and the prototype AGR reactor that was retained by UKAEA following the creation of BNFL.
Visit Windscale Website
A number of leaks of radioactive liquors to ground are known to have occurred from several plant buildings, waste storage vaults and burial trenches within the site, largely associated with the older process plant in the Separation Area. Records from boreholes and other excavations undertaken during three decades of site engineering and construction work have demonstrated that radioactively contaminated ground exists beneath parts of the Separation Area and occasionally in the wider site. In addition to radioactivity, there is the potential for other components of spent fuel reprocessing to have contaminated ground, including inorganic salts from neutralised acids, solvents and other organic compounds as well as the more typical contaminants normally associated with industrial activity, such as heavy metals, fuel, oils, etc. The site has had its own on-site landfills for disposal of waste throughout the operation of the plant, initially in trenches within the Separation Area in the 1950s and then in mounds built up on the coastal fringe and on the northern perimeter of the site.
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Disposal Trench - 1950s |  |
Calder landfill |
