Powerful vision of future fades into history

Published on Tuesday 14 August 2007 00:21

1 The test took place at 1pm on 13 August, 1957, in Cell 1 of Dounreay's Experimental Criticality Facility, code-named D1249.

2 3,000 were employed at Dounreay at its peak, transforming the local economy.

3 The population of nearby Thurso grew from 3,000 in 1951 to 9,000 in 1971.

4 Until the 1950s, Dounreay was an area of grazing land with just a 16th century ruined castle, a farm and a Second World War aerodrome, called HMS Tern (II).

5 The building has been decommissioned and demolished.

6 The site is 140 acres in size.

7 In 1954, the government selected Dounreay as the location for the national centre for research and development of fast-breeder reactors, a new type of atomic energy.

8 Fast reactors were thought to have good potential for generating electricity as they made more efficient use of uranium fuel.

9 Construction work on the site began in 1955.

10 Two fast reactors were built - the Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR), which operated from 1959 to 1977, and the Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR), a larger model that ran from 1974 to 1994.

11 A materials test reactor (DMTR) also operated from 1958 to 1969.

12 300 individual plates make up the famous golfball-shaped "dome of discovery".

13 The first electrical power from DFR was exported to the national grid in October 1962.

14 600 million kilowatt-hours of electricity were supplied by DFR during its working lifetime.

15 In 1988, the government decided that there was no short-term need for fast reactors and the programme ended in 1993.

16 Reprocessing of PFR fuel continued until 1996, and spare capacity in fuel plants allowed commercial work, including the manufacture of fuel elements and recovery of enriched uranium.

17 In the late 1990s, the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) stopped new commercial work to concentrate on decommissioning the site.

18 A public consultation will be held this year into whether the dome should be kept.

19 The UKAEA originally estimated that it would take 100 years to decommission Dounreay.

20 The timetable was revised to 50 years after pressure from industry regulators.

21 2033 has been given as the most recent date for the clean-up of the site to be completed.

22 The original cost of decommissioning was put at 4.5 billion.

23 2.9 billion is the current estimated cost of decommissioning.

24 1,500 separate projects have been identified as part of the plan to restore the environment of the Dounreay site.

25 20 per cent of the work has been completed in the first seven years of the clean-up.

26 99 buildings have been knocked down so far as part of the clean-up of the Dounreay site.

27 It will cost 250 million to clear out DFR, and take until 2030.

28 It will cost 200 million to clear out PFR, which will take until 2032.

29 Work costing 164 million was carried out at Dounreay between April 2006 and April 2007.

30 115 tonnes of sodium, which had been used as a coolant, was destroyed on the site last year.

31 3,576 drums of solid, low-level radioactive waste were processed for disposal on-site last year.

32 300 tonnes of scrap metal was recycled at the site during the past 12 months.

33 It will cost 180 million to clean out the notorious waste shaft over the next 20 years.

34 800 cubic metres of waste are contained in the waste shaft, in which an explosion in 1977 caused it to be sealed off.

35 143 safety recommendations had to be addressed by Dounreay after an audit by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency in 1998.

36 On a scale of one to ten, the 1998 audit gave Dounreay a mark of seven. A mark of one was considered world-class and ten unlicensable.

37 Dounreay contributes 80 million to the Scottish economy every year.

38 The plant is responsible for one out of five jobs in the area.

39 More than 2,000 now work at the site.

40 The decommissioning of Dounreay is said to support an additional 5,000 jobs across the UK.

41 UKAEA has trained more than 1,000 engineering apprentices at Dounreay since 1955.

42 10 million has been spent trying to resolve the continuing problem of radioactive particles being found on beaches near the complex.

43 Since 1983, more than 900 particles have been found on the nearby seabed and over 200 on beaches.

44 19 radioactive particles were found last year during monitoring of five million metres of local beaches.

45 Dounreay is nine miles west of Thurso.

46 The UKAEA was fined 15,000 on 12 July this year for health and safety failings that led to a worker breathing in plutonium.

47 In February, the UKAEA was fined 140,000 for releasing radioactive particles into the sea and illegally dumping radioactive waste.

48 2.9 tonnes of thorium nitrate exported to Peru from Dounreay almost ten years ago has been returned to Caithness. The waste was originally produced at Dounreay as a by-product of reprocessing and was exported to Peru in 1998, but it could not be treated or disposed of.

49 Dounreay is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), a government body which has responsibility for the clean-up of the UK's 20 civil nuclear sites.

50 Dounreay's Ordnance Survey grid reference is NC982669