Sellafield

 ( Organisations : Sellafield-ltd Official Website ) 

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, 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.

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.

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.

The inventories in question were accepted as satisfactory by Euratom, the relevant regulatory agency.

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 of uranium and 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.

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.

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.

A 1997 Ministry of Health report stated that children living close to Sellafield had twice as much plutonium in their teeth as children living more than away. Health Minister Melanie Johnson said the quantities were minute and "presented no risk to public health". This claim, according to a book written by Stephanie Cooke, was challenged by Professor Eric Wright, an expert on blood disorders at the University of Dundee, who said that even microscopic amounts of plutonium might cause cancer.Stephanie Cooke (2009). , Black Inc., p. 356.

Studies carried out by the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) in 2003 reported no evidence of raised childhood cancer in general around nuclear power plants, but did report an excess of leukaemia (cancer of the blood or bone) and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL, a blood cancer) near two other nuclear installations including Sellafield, the Atomic Weapons Establishment Burghfield and UKAEA Dounreay. COMARE's conclusion was that "the excesses around Sellafield and Dounreay are unlikely to be due to chance, although there is not at present a convincing explanation for them". In earlier reports COMARE had suggested that "a mechanism involving infection may be a significant factor." The clusters have disappeared in the early 1990s.

In a study published in the British Journal of Cancer, which also did not find an increase in any other cancers other than Leukemia, the authors of which attempted to quantify the effect population mixing might have on the Seascale leukaemia cluster. In the analysis of childhood leukaemia/NHL in Cumbria, excluding Seascale, they noted that if both parents were born outside the Cumbrian area (incomers), there was a significantly higher rate of leukaemia/NHL in their children. 1181 children were born in the village of Seascale between 1950 and 1989, in children aged 1–14 during this period, the Seascale cluster of 6 observed cases of NHL were noted. Two similarly aged children, born between 1950 and 1989, outside Seascale were also diagnosed with ALL/NHL before the end of 1992. The origin of birth of 11 of the 16 parents of these eight children was known, and found to be; 3 had parents born outside Cumbria and 3 had one parent born outside the UK. The study's authors strongly supported the hypothesis that the risk of ALL/NHL, in particular in the younger age group, increases with increased exposure to population mixing during gestation or early in life. Although they determined that the exact mechanism by which it causes these malignancies, apart from Kinlen's infection aetiology that was mentioned, remained unknown, concluding that the possibility of additional risk factors in Seascale remains.

In an examination of all causes of stillbirth and infant mortality in Cumbria taken as a whole, between 1950 and 1993, 4,325 stillbirths, 3,430 neonatal death and 1,569 lethal congenital anomalies, occurred among 287,993 births. Overall, results did not infer an increased risk of still birth or neonatal death in Cumbria, the rate of these negative outcomes were largely in line with the British baseline rate. However, there was a cautioned connection between a small excess of increased risk of death from lethal congenital anomalies and proximity to municipal waste and chemical waste being noted. With two examples of the latter crematoriums operating in both Barrow-in-Furness and further afield at Carlisle, crematoriums which may have emitted various chemical dioxins during their operation.

The Windscale fire has also been the subject of three BBC documentaries. The first, shown originally in 1990, was entitled Our Reactor is on Fire, and was part of the Inside Story series. A 30-minute drama-documentary about the incident was then released in 1999 as part of the BBC's Disaster series; the episode was entitled Atomic Inferno – The Windscale Fire and was later released on DVD. During the 50-year anniversary of the incident in 2007, another documentary was released by the BBC entitled Windscale: Britain's Biggest Nuclear Disaster. All three of these documentaries include interviews with key plant workers and Tom Tuohy, the deputy general manager of Windscale at the time of the accident and the man who risked his life to extinguish the flames.

In the 1985 BBC radio series Nineteen Ninety-Four, a comedic parody of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, civil servant Edward Wilson discovers that Cumbria, which the governing Department of the Environment had claimed had witnessed widespread devastation via an unspecified natural or manmade disaster in 1990, had been converted into Sellingfield, a secret socially engineered community built on consumerism, advertising and market research.

Fallout, a 2006 drama shown on the Irish national TV station RTÉ, based on the false premise that parts of Ireland would need to be evacuated following a serious accident at Sellafield, showed that following the accident there are evacuation riots, societal collapse and widespread health impacts. Dr Ann McGarry, chief executive of the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland, said: "The scenario envisaged in the programme is not realistic and grossly exaggerates the amount of radioactivity that could reach Ireland. The RPII cannot envisage any realistic scenario that would cause the radiation levels in Ireland to reach the concentrations as what was depicted in the drama". The Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland (RPII) said that "the scenario as depicted in tonight's RTÉ drama, Fallout, could not happen. The RPII, who viewed the drama...has analysed the scenario as depicted and has concluded that it is not possible for such an accident to occur in Sellafield."

A 2015 BBC Four documentary, Britain's Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield, examined the various radiation leaks and incidents that have occurred at Sellafield over the years and the health risks that have arisen as a result.

In 2016, Sellafield featured in an episode of the BBC series Panorama (TV series). The 30-minute documentary documented the many dangerous accidents and incidents that have occurred at the site over the years, and featured interviews with a mysterious whistleblower.

The 2025 videogame Atomfall is set in an alternate history 1960s where the Windscale fire turned much of the Lake District into a radioactive quarantine zone.

• Derrick Bird, perpetrator of the 2010 Cumbria shootings. Bird worked at Sellafield until 1990, when he was sacked for a theft that resulted in him receiving a suspended 12-month prison sentence.

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1. Sellafield, Erik Martiniussen, Bellona Foundation, December 2003,
2. Technetium-99 Behaviour in the Terrestrial Environment – Field Observations and Radiotracer Experiments, Keiko Tagami, Journal of Nuclear and Radiochemical Sciences, Vol. 4, No.1, pp. A1-A8, 2003
3. The excess of childhood leukaemia near Sellafield: a commentary on the fourth COMARE report, L J Kinlen et al. 1997 J. Radiol. Prot. 17 63–71

• 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

• "Britain's Pioneer Atomic Power Plants." Popular Mechanics, June 1954, pp.74–75, cutaway drawing of facilities.
• Calder Hall, Nuclear Engineering International wall chart, October 1956
• Sellafield Stories at Cumbria County Council oral history project