Sellafield Ltd has taken an important step towards decommissioning a 60-year-old storage pond originally built to store fuel from the Windscale Pile Reactors, by retrieving the very first nuclear fuel out of the pond since the 1960s.

The Pile Fuel Storage Pond (PFSP) was the very first nuclear fuel storage pond constructed at Sellafield and to this day remains the largest open air nuclear storage pond in the world. The pond was built to store nuclear fuel and isotopes from the Windscale Reactors that produced nuclear materials for the defence industry. The Windscales Piles as they are better known never actually generated electricity, but were the precursor to our Calder Hall reactor – the first commercial reactor in the world. Read it all..

The Windscale site at Sellafield has transferred from the Infrastructure Directorate to the Decommissioning Directorate – in a move which will encourage more integrated working between the two. Read it all..