Nuclear in the UK: Back to the future

[jpak]

http://www.energybulletin.net/9605.html

I am not trying to cast a shadow over what I hope will be a long and happy life for Mark Lesinski, one of the engineers entrusted with turning the site of the defunct Hinkley A nuclear power station, in Somerset, into a place where sheep may safely graze. But I do wonder how it feels to be working on a project that won't be finished until (barring some extraordinary medical breakthrough) long after he, and everybody else involved - and me - are dead.

"I'll probably have to go and put a message to future generations inside one of the reactor buildings before we seal them up," he says. What would the message be? "I haven't thought about that." Ken Allan, a colleague of Lesinski's, chips in with a suggestion: "If you've got a problem, don't phone me."

They started building Hinkley A in 1957. The site will be returned to green fields in 2103, having generated electricity for about one-third of its existence. For most of this century, the two 120ft-high blue metal boxes that enclose the station's shutdown reactors will stand, cold, sealed and silent, their dangerous residual radioactivity shut up inside.

Even 2103 will not be the end for the most radioactive waste products. Most likely they will, mid-century, be buried deep underground, somewhere in Britain. They won't be safe for a million years. A million years is a long time for humans, who live on average for 80, and governments, which live for four, to be making plans over. A million years ago, our ancestors were in Africa, and rival species of mammoth clashed on the English tundra.

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