Nils Bøhmer

Of primary concern on the United Kingdom’s nuclear landscape are the 15 Cold War legacy sites storing high amounts of radioactive waste, including Sellafield, that are to be decommissioned over the next several decades by the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). Many of these are still semi-operational as civilian sites that, for example, reprocess nuclear fuel such as Sellafield’s Thorp facility. Of primary international concern is the cleaning up discharges from these NDA managed facilities. With help from Bellona, for instance, Sellafield reduced its discharges of deadly TC-99 by 98 percent. But other remnants of the race for the bomb remain and must be dealt with at NDA site. The country employs 23 nuclear reactors―of the Magnox , Advanced Gas Cooled, and Pressurised Water types―that provide for some 20 percent of its energy.