Sellafield Limited

Background

Sellafield Ltd employs approximately 11,000 staff and is located on the West Cumbrian coast adjacent to the Irish Sea on the western outskirts of the Lake District National Park.

The site has been operational since the 1940s and led the development of the UK’s nuclear industry, from the production of plutonium for the country’s nuclear deterrent programme through to the development of nuclear power generation.

The site is home to Calder Hall, the world’s first commercial nuclear power station which operated between 1956 and 2003. Since the closure of Calder Hall and the three Windscale Reactors (Windscale Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor, Windscale Pile 1 and Windscale Pile 2) electricity is no longer generated at the site.

The majority of the facilities on the site relate to its main function of reprocessing fuel from nuclear reactors to recover uranium and plutonium, and the processing and storage of the wastes arising from this. The reprocessing of oxide fuels ceased in 2018 and Magnox reprocessing stopped in 2022. The site still receives and stores fuel from the UK’s fleet of Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors. 

The focus of Sellafield Ltd is now on the remediation and clean-up of the hundreds of nuclear and non-nuclear facilities across the site; safe and secure storage of special nuclear materials; and the safe retrieval of nuclear waste from the legacy ponds and silos, for storage in modern facilities.

Hazard and risk reduction at Sellafield is both a national decommissioning priority and one of our top regulatory priorities.

Certain facilities on the Sellafield site have different regulatory attention levels. Further details on attention levels can be found in the latest Chief Nuclear Inspector’s Annual Report.