Once Windscale, now Sellafield. A fire in 1957, the first major safety crisis (the world's worst nuclear disaster before Chernobyl) at the nuclear installation in West Cumbria, prompted a renaming but the ghost of "Windscale man" lived on. Plutonium has been made at the site since 1942, reprocessing following in the early 1950s. In 1956, the world's first nuclear power station, Calder Hall, was opened on the site and still operates.
The livelihoods of 10,000 people depend on Britain's largest nuclear complex which includes two reprocessing plants, taking the nuclear waste of others and regenerating fuel. It is home to the new Thorp reprocessing plant, which a group of Dundalk residents is attempting to close by way of court challenge. Production of mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, a mixture of uranium and plutonium oxides, was the latest venture. A demonstration MOX facility operated commercially from 1993 followed by a full-scale £300 million plant.
BNFL has also moved into the waste clean-up business elsewhere, facilitated by takeovers of Westinghouse's nuclear operations in the US and ABB in Europe. Those damning Nuclear Installations Inspectorate's reports suggest Windscale Man still looms large.