Life as a nuclear decommissioner
MAY 29, 2009
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.023377
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.
© 2009. American Institute of Physics