Subscribe to this blog's feedThose iconic cooling towers were not the only things crashing to the ground last week. The possibility that one of Calder Hall’s now closed reactors might become a nuclear “museum”, a new tourist attraction at the Sellafield site in Cumbria, has hit the deck. But not running.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the public owner of the site, commissioned engineering consultancy Atkins to look at the viability of preserving Calder Hall reactor number one and using it as the basis for a high-tech state-of-the-art visitor attraction to complement the existing award-winning facility originally developed by British Nuclear Fuels.
However, Atkins estimated that the project would cost in the region of £128 million and the NDA has failed to garner significant support either from the private sector or local authorities in Cumbria.
So the plan has been shelved. The NDA said: “Given the NDA’s priorities of tackling high hazards and decommissioning, alternative funding would need to be identified for this project to progress.”
Quite.
