Windscale
Former name of Sellafield, a nuclear power station in Cumbria, England.
Windscale
| Former name of the nuclear installation at Sellafield, Cumbria, northwest England. |
| The site suffered a serious fire on 10 October 1957 in a reactor called Windscale Pile 1. The fire was extinguished by desperate and heroic improvization, but led to the release of radioactive isotopes of iodine, caesium, and polonium, with an activity of 700 TBq (700 terabecquerels, or 700 trillion becquerels). The release has been estimated to have caused at least 200 cancers. Pile 1 was unusable thereafter and its twin, Pile 2, was shut down as a precaution. |
| In 1981 the name of the general site was altered to Sellafield, but an island site within that, containing Pile 1, Pile 2, and the WAGR (Windscale Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor, remained under the control of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), and Windscale was retained as its name. The radioactive core of the damaged reactor is still being removed, and is so dangerous that robots are being used. The UKAEA states that ‘major site hazards’ will have been removed by 2015. |
