Read more: "How to dismantle a nuclear reactor"
FROM the safety of a computer screen in the control room, I can see a robot scoop up a chunk of asbestos from the reactor floor. I am at Sellafield, the nuclear complex on the coast of Cumbria in north-west England, watching remotely controlled machinery crawl through the defunct Windscale Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor, gradually stripping out the last of its guts.
The mammoth task of dismantling the reactor started in the early 1990s but is only now finally nearing completion. With its totemic golf-ball shaped exterior, this was the prototype of a brave new generation of British-designed nuclear power plants built between the 1960s and the 1980s. It joined 26 more defunct stations of an earlier design, now dotted around the UK coastline like beached ships. These older plants are so full of radioactive debris that nobody will try to disassemble ...
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