September 23, 2012

  • Inside Sellafield

    The book I read to research this post was Inside Sellafield by Harold Bolter which is a very good book which I bought from a local charity shop. Sellafield is a very important nuclear power station which also helps in the manufacture of nuclear weapons and reprocessing waste fissionable material. I went on a tour around Sellafield when I was at school at the time there was free admission and also they had a visitor centre. If you ever get the chance I highly recommend it. Anyway Harold was the longest serving director on the board of British Nuclear Fuels. He has seen it being privatised which he thinks helped make it more competitive. He started out as a business correspondent for the Financial Times. Later he got a job with BNFL dealing with public relations. He reckons Sellafield has had problems but the nuclear industry in Britain stands comparison to almost any other industry. Certain people do want Sellafield shut down and one problem they had was some greenpeace demonstrators were diving by where the waste pipe comes out and thought they'd been contaminated. They thought falsely that more waste had come out than usual. Obviously it's ill advised to go anywhere near the waste pipe. In another incident the government had to close some of the beaches because too much waste had been produced. At one time they used to dump nuclear waste deep in the Atlantic. Obviously the containers are going to corrode eventually causing problems. 

oldscratbag

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