Magnox Reprocessing Plant

The Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, or THORP, is a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, England. THORP is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and operated by Sellafield Ltd, the site licensee. Spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors was reprocessed to separate the 96% uranium and the 1% plutonium from the 3% radioactive wastes, which are treated and stored at the plant. The uranium is then made available for customers to be manufactured into new fuel, and the plutonium incorporated into mixed oxide fuel. On 14 November 2018 it was announced that reprocessing operations had ended at THORP after earning £9bn in revenue. The receipt and storage facility (which makes up nearly half of THORP's physical footprint), will operate through to the 2070s to receive and store spent nuclear fuel from the UK's PWR and AGR fleet. The decommissioning is expected to start around 2075.

The River Calder is a river in Cumbria, England. The river rises at Lankrigg Moss and flows southwards for 10 miles (16 km) through an ancient landscape, flowing under Monks Bridge (a packhorse bridge) and by the site of Calder Abbey, as well as several tumuli and other mysterious monuments. It also runs past and (indirectly) gives its name to Calder Hall, site of the world's first commercial nuclear reactor. Near its mouth the river runs through the Sellafield nuclear site in an artificially straightened section before flowing into the Irish Sea at the same point as the River Ehen, just southwest of Sellafield.

The Windscale Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (WAGR) was a nuclear power plant constructed on the Sellafield 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. The licensed site covers an area of 265 hectares (650 acres), and comprises more than 200 nuclear facilities and more than 1,000 buildings. It is Europe's largest nuclear site and has the most diverse range of nuclear facilities in the world on a single site. The site's workforce size varies, and before the COVID-19 pandemic was approximately 10,000 people. The UK's National Nuclear Laboratory has its Central Laboratory and headquarters on the site. Originally built as a Royal Ordnance Factory in 1942, the site briefly passed into the ownership of Courtaulds for rayon manufacture following World War II, but was re-acquired by the Ministry of Supply in 1947 for the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons which required the construction of the Windscale Piles and the First Generation Reprocessing Plant, and it was renamed "Windscale Works". Subsequent key developments have included the building of Calder Hall nuclear power station - the world's first nuclear power station to export electricity on a commercial scale to a public grid, the Magnox fuel reprocessing plant, the prototype Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR) and the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP). Decommissioning projects include the Windscale Piles, Calder Hall nuclear power station, and historic reprocessing facilities and waste stores. The site is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) which is a non-departmental public body of the UK government. Following a period 2008–2016 of management by a private consortium, the site was returned to direct government control by making the Site Management Company, Sellafield Ltd, a subsidiary of the NDA. Decommissioning of legacy facilities, some of which date back to the UK's first efforts to produce an atomic bomb, is planned for completion by 2120 at a cost of £121 billion. Sellafield was the site in 1957 of the UK's worst nuclear accident. This was the Windscale fire which occurred when uranium metal fuel ignited inside Windscale Pile no.1. Radioactive contamination was released into the environment, it has been estimated that this caused around 240 cancers in the long term, with 100 of these predicted to be fatal, though epidemiological studies have failed to find any such increase. The incident was rated 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.

Sellafield is a railway station on the Cumbrian Coast Line, which runs between Carlisle and Barrow-in-Furness. It serves Sellafield, in Cumbria, England; it is situated 35 miles (56 km) north-west of Barrow-in-Furness. The station is owned by Network Rail and managed by Northern Trains.

The Windscale Piles were two air-cooled graphite-moderated nuclear reactors on the Windscale nuclear site in Cumberland (now known as Sellafield site, Cumbria) on the north-west coast of England. The two reactors, referred to at the time as "piles", were built as part of the British post-war atomic bomb project and produced weapons-grade plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Windscale Pile No. 1 became operational in October 1950 followed by Pile No. 2 in June 1951. They were intended to last five years, but operated for seven until shut down following the Windscale fire on 10 October 1957. Nuclear decommissioning operations commenced in the 1980s and are estimated to last beyond 2040. Visible changes have been seen as the chimneys were slowly dismantled from top-down; Pile 2's chimney being reduced to the height of adjacent buildings in the early 2000s. However, the demolition of pile 1 chimney has taken much longer as it was significantly contaminated after the 1957 fire. The reactor cores still remain to be dismantled.

The Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom's history, ranked in severity at level 5 out of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site (now Sellafield) on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland. The two graphite-moderated reactors, referred to at the time as "piles", had been built as part of the British post-war atomic bomb project. Windscale Pile No. 1 was operational in October 1950, followed by Pile No. 2 in June 1951. The fire burned for three days and released radioactive fallout which spread across the UK and the rest of Europe. The radioactive isotope iodine-131, which may lead to cancer of the thyroid, was of particular concern at the time. It has since come to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were also released. Calculations based on the amount of radiation released estimate that the accident may have caused 190 cases of cancer, with around 100 of these being fatal, however recent epidemiological studies failed to find any such increase. At the time of the incident, no one was evacuated from the surrounding area, but milk from about 500 km2 (190 square miles) of the nearby countryside was destroyed for about a month afterward due to concerns about it being contaminated with iodine-131. The UK government played down the events at the time, and reports on the fire were subject to heavy censorship, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan feared the incident would harm British–American nuclear relations. The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up to the accident. In early 1957, there had been a leak of radioactive material in which strontium-90 was released into the environment. Like the later fire, this incident was covered up by the British government. Later studies on the release of radioactive material due to the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire. A 2010 study of workers involved in the cleanup of the accident found no significant long-term health effects from their involvement.

Calder Hall Nuclear Power Station is a former Magnox nuclear power station on the Sellafield site in Cumbria in North West England. Calder Hall was the first full-scale nuclear power station to enter operation in the World, and was the sister plant to the Chapelcross plant in Scotland. Both were commissioned and originally operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. The primary purpose of both plants was to produce weapons-grade plutonium for the UK's nuclear weapons programme, but they also generated electrical power for the National Grid. Decommissioning by Sellafield Ltd started in 2005. The site is partially demolished and is expected that only the reactor cores and associated radiation shielding will remain by 2027, when it will enter a period of extended care and maintenance using the "safestore" principle, before final demolition.

Calder is a small hamlet in Cumbria, England. It is overlooked by the Sellafield nuclear plant—Calder Hall Nuclear Power Station was the world's first major nuclear power station when it opened in 1956.

Grey Croft stone circle is a restored stone circle near Seascale in Cumbria, England (grid reference NY03340238). It is situated near the site of the former nuclear-power stations at Sellafield.

Moorside clean energy hub is a proposal put forward on 30 June 2020 by two consortia, one led by EDF and the other by Rolls-Royce, to create an energy hub that would produce electricity and hydrogen through the use of nuclear power and renewable energy. The hub would be constructed on the cancelled Moorside nuclear power station site, which was abandoned by Toshiba in 2018.

Moorside nuclear power station is proposed for a site near Sellafield, in Cumbria, England. The original plan by NuGeneration, a British subsidiary of Toshiba-owned Westinghouse Electric Company, had the station coming online from 2024 with 3.4 GW of new nuclear capacity, from three AP1000 reactors. Work up to 2018 would include acquiring the site licence, the development consent order, and other required permits and permissions to start work. Site preparation was to take two years, up to 2020. Following the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Westinghouse in March 2017, the project was put under review. From December 2017 to July 2018 Kepco was named as preferred bidder. Kepco were thought to prefer their own APR-1400 reactor design for the site, a design which had not yet gone through generic design assessment with the UK's Office for Nuclear Regulation. On 8 November 2018, it was announced that Toshiba's plans for the new nuclear power station had been scrapped and its subsidiary company, NuGen, would be wound up. The Moorside site was handed back to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and the government issued a statement reaffirming its commitment to new nuclear. In July 2020, a EDF-led Moorside consortium announced a proposal for two EPR reactors yielding 3,200 MWe of new nuclear capacity. A second Rolls-Royce-led UK SMR consortium plans a low-carbon power station around a small light-water reactor and the possibility of a link with renewable technologies, storage systems and hydrogen production named Moorside clean energy hub.