PLANS to decommission the wrecked reactor responsible for Britain’s worst
nuclear accident have been shelved because of fears that it could catch fire
again. The move has serious implications for the dismantling of other reactors,
such as Britain’s ageing Magnox plants and the damaged reactor at Chernobyl in
Ukraine.
The damaged British reactor is Windscale pile 1 at the Sellafield complex in
Cumbria. The problem is a type of energy called Wigner energy, which becomes
trapped in the reactor’s graphite moderator when neutrons dislodge carbon atoms
from their crystalline lattice. Wigner energy was the main cause of the accident
at…
