Work has started to remove historic waste from the pile fuel cladding silo – one of the oldest and most hazardous storage facilities at the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, northwest England.
The start of waste removal, which could take 20 years, follows approval by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR). The silo was originally commissioned in the early 1950s.
The ONR said it is priority to ensure the waste stored in the ageing silo is removed and placed into storage facilities that meet modern safety standards.
Built in the 1950s to store cladding from used nuclear fuel from the Windscale Piles – the first nuclear reactors to be built at Sellafield – the vast concrete silo was designed as a “locked vault” with no plan for how to retrieve its contents or decommission the building.