Sellafield railway station

Sellafield is a railway station on the Cumbrian Coast Line, which runs between Carlisle and Barrow-in-Furness. It serves Sellafield, in Cumbria, England; it is situated 35 miles (56 km) north-west of Barrow-in-Furness. The station is owned by Network Rail and managed by Northern Trains.

1. History

The station, which dates from 1850, is a busy freight location; this is because much of the nuclear waste for Sellafield's THORP nuclear fuel reprocessing plant is carried there by train from the docks in Barrow-in-Furness or from rail-connected nuclear power stations elsewhere in the UK. The facility also generates significant commuter traffic for the railway, with workers travelling by train from nearby towns and villages. The station is at the end of the single-line section from Whitehaven, which is operated using the electric key token system. From there, the line south towards Ravenglass and Barrow is double tracked, except for the final section between Park South Junction (south of Askam) and Barrow, which was reduced to a single track in the late 1980s. The station used to be the southern terminus of the former Whitehaven, Cleator and Egremont Railway line from Egremont, from August 1869 until the line's closure in March 1964.

1. Layout

The station configuration is unusual in that the southbound ('up' line) is bi-directional through the station and has platform faces on both sides. However, only the eastern platform face is used, with the other side being fenced off. This allows trains from the south to terminate and turn back without having to enter the single-line section to St Bees. The signal box controlling the layout is located at the north end of the station, whilst the exchange sidings for the plant and the locomotive depot used by Direct Rail Services' freight trains are to the south. There are two water cranes at the station, one at each end.

1. Facilities

The station is not staffed, but there is now a ticket machine in the main building for passengers to buy tickets prior to travel. There is a waiting room on the southbound platform and a shelter on the opposite side; the other main buildings are in private commercial use and there are no facilities for car parking. The platforms are linked by a footbridge which does not include ramps, so only the Barrow platform has step-free access. Train running information is provided by digital information screens, timetable posters and telephone.

1. Services

There is a basic hourly service (with a few variations) in each direction between Barrow-in-Furness and Carlisle. Certain southbound trains continue to Lancaster, with one service from the south terminating and turning back at Sellafield on weekdays only. In November 2011, it was reported that Direct Rail Services (DRS) had applied to the Office of Rail Regulation to operate one train in each direction between Carlisle and Sellafield to carry workers to the nuclear facility. Between May 2015 and December 2018, four trains per day each way ran to provide additional seating capacity for workers at the Sellafield plant, using Mark 2 coaches and Class 37 diesel locomotives hired in from DRS.

1. References


1. External links

Media related to Sellafield railway station at Wikimedia Commons

Train times and station information for Sellafield railway station from National Rail

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Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant

The Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, or THORP, is a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, England. THORP is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and operated by Sellafield Ltd, the site licensee. Spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors was reprocessed to separate the 96% uranium and the 1% plutonium from the 3% radioactive wastes, which are treated and stored at the plant. The uranium is then made available for customers to be manufactured into new fuel, and the plutonium incorporated into mixed oxide fuel. On 14 November 2018 it was announced that reprocessing operations had ended at THORP after earning £9bn in revenue. The receipt and storage facility (which makes up nearly half of THORP's physical footprint), will operate through to the 2070s to receive and store spent nuclear fuel from the UK's PWR and AGR fleet. The decommissioning is expected to start around 2075.

Industrial Landmark

Magnox Reprocessing Plant

The Magnox Reprocessing Plant is a former nuclear reprocessing facility at Sellafield in northern England, which operated from 1964 to 2022. The plant used PUREX chemistry (based on tributyl phosphate (TBP)) to extract plutonium and uranium from used nuclear fuel originating primarily from Magnox reactors. The plant was originally constructed and operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), but in 1971 control was transferred to British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL). From 2005 the plant was operated by Sellafield Ltd.

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River Calder, Cumbria

The River Calder is a river in Cumbria, England. The river rises at Lankrigg Moss and flows southwards for 10 miles (16 km) through an ancient landscape, flowing under Monks Bridge (a packhorse bridge) and by the site of Calder Abbey, as well as several tumuli and other mysterious monuments. It also runs past and (indirectly) gives its name to Calder Hall, site of the world's first commercial nuclear reactor. Near its mouth the river runs through the Sellafield nuclear site in an artificially straightened section before flowing into the Irish Sea at the same point as the River Ehen, just southwest of Sellafield.

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Sellafield

Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. Former activities included nuclear power generation from 1956 to 2003, and nuclear fuel reprocessing from 1952 to 2022. The licensed site covers an area of 265 hectares (650 acres), and comprises more than 200 nuclear facilities and more than 1,000 buildings. It is Europe's largest nuclear site and has the most diverse range of nuclear facilities in the world on a single site. The site's workforce size varies, and before the COVID-19 pandemic was approximately 10,000 people. The UK's National Nuclear Laboratory has its Central Laboratory and headquarters on the site. Originally built as a Royal Ordnance Factory in 1942, the site briefly passed into the ownership of Courtaulds for rayon manufacture following World War II, but was re-acquired by the Ministry of Supply in 1947 for the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons which required the construction of the Windscale Piles and the First Generation Reprocessing Plant, and it was renamed "Windscale Works". Subsequent key developments have included the building of Calder Hall nuclear power station - the world's first nuclear power station to export electricity on a commercial scale to a public grid, the Magnox fuel reprocessing plant, the prototype Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR) and the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP). Decommissioning projects include the Windscale Piles, Calder Hall nuclear power station, and historic reprocessing facilities and waste stores. The site is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) which is a non-departmental public body of the UK government. Following a period 2008–2016 of management by a private consortium, the site was returned to direct government control by making the Site Management Company, Sellafield Ltd, a subsidiary of the NDA. Decommissioning of legacy facilities, some of which date back to the UK's first efforts to produce an atomic bomb, is planned for completion by 2120 at a cost of £121 billion. Sellafield was the site in 1957 of one of the world's worst nuclear incidents. This was the Windscale fire which occurred when uranium metal fuel ignited inside Windscale Pile no.1. Radioactive contamination was released into the environment, which it is now estimated caused around 240 cancers in the long term, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal. The incident was rated 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.

Historic Site Industrial