Elements of Risk
In October 1956, The Queen threw a switch at Calder Hall in Cumbria. Britain has been producing nuclear power for electricity ever since. But with nuclear electricity has come nuclear waste. Spent fuel elements from reactors have to be changed. They are intensely radioactive.
In April 1979. scientists still do not know what to do with nuclear waste. Today our nuclear stations light one electric lamp bulb in every ten; by the year 2000 it will be one in every two. The waste comes to Windscale, alongside Calder Hall , by the trainload - now from other people's power stations as well as our own. Each wagon's contents have already released 40 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. But still locked inside are radio-nuclides that can cause cancer and are indestructible for thousands of years.
America's Harrisburg accident highlighted one kind of nuclear risk; here at Britain's Windscale another kind of risk is run daily. Horizon, for the first time, traces the inner workings of Windscale. What goes on there? What precisely happens to that nuclear scrap? How much is leaking into the environment? Will our descendants, in 500 or 1,000 years' time, bless us for tidy energy conservation or curse us for bequeathing a permanent poison? Narrator PAUL VAUGHAN
Film editor TED WALTER
Editor SIMON CAMPBELL-JONES Written and produced by CHRISTOPHER RILEY