Sellafield

Thorp fuel plant to restart in new year

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

By Rebecca Bream, Utilities Correspondent
Mon Oct 22 23:06:32 EDT 2007

The Thorp nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Sellafield is set to restart full commercial operations in the new year, almost three years after it was closed following a radioactive leak.

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Contaminated ground

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Oct 11th 2007 , rom The Economist print editio

The shadow of an old accident haunts Britain's nuclear revival
THIS is a big week in the government's attempt to rehabilitate nuclear energy. Eight months after a court ruled that its first public consultation on whether to build more reactors had been misleading and unfair, its second attempt finished on October 10th. For a government with (until recently) a reputation for slick public relations, that date looks ill-judged. For it also marks the 50th anniversary of a fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in Cumbria that was, until Three Mile Island in 1979, the world's worst atomic accident (the Chernobyl explosion in 1986 dwarfs both).

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Cost of nuclear clean-up rises to £73bn

Thursday, October 11, 2007

The official cost of cleaning up 20 of Britain's nuclear facilities will be more than £73bn, 16% higher than estimated last year, according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority yesterday. The latest rise in clean-up costs came as the government completed consultation on whether to proceed with a new generation of atomic plants, with one potential operator arguing there was a "moral imperative" to allow more to be built.

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Windscale: A nuclear disaster

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

By Paul Dwyer
Producer, Windscale: Britain's biggest nuclear disaster

Fifty years ago, on the night of 10 October 1957, Britain was on the brink of an unprecedented nuclear tragedy. A fire ripped through the radioactive materials in the core of Windscale, Britain's first nuclear reactor.

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Big Bang Changes Cumbrian Skyline

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Big Bang Changes Cumbrian Skyline

Updated: 12:37, Saturday September 29, 2007

Four cooling towers at Sellafield's Calder Hall site in Cumbria have been razed to the ground after helping generate electricity for nearly 50 years.

The world's first commercial nuclear power station is being demolished.

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Thorp is back

Friday, September 14, 2007

14 September 2007

The Sellafield site operator has reported that the initial 33t shearing campaign as part of the phased restart of the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp), which commenced on 4 July 2007, has been successful. The modified plant and procedures for the Feed Clarification Cell have now been fully recommissioned and tested.

The liquors resulting from the leak discovered in April 2005 and held in buffer storage since then have been reprocessed.

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The Perils of Pushing Atomic Energy as the Climate Change Panacea

Thursday, May 10, 2007

By Philip Bethge (Der Spiegel)

Is nuclear power on the verge of a renaissance? Its supporters argue that atomic energy is the only way to satisfy humanity’s hunger for more energy without aggravating the effects of global warming. Critics, however, regard the nuclear hype as over-simplistic optimism fueled by an industry in distress.

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