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Life as a nuclear decommissioner

MAY 29, 2009
Physics Today
BBC NEWS : These days, neither electricity nor weapons are produced at the Sellafield nuclear plant .

Nevertheless, some 10,000 staff and 2,000 contractors work here - considerably more than the 8,000 or so people who worked in nuclear research and development during the industry’s heyday, in the early 1980s.

They carry out very little productive work - instead, their job is positively destructive: they are demolishing long-since closed nuclear power plants and atomic weapons research facilities, many of them contaminated by nuclear waste after more than half a century of energy and weapons production.

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