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The Windscale facility was later rebranded as Sellafield in 1981, a strategic move to distance the operations from the earlier disaster. Today, Sellafield operates more like a small town, with over 200 buildings and close to 12,000 workers engaged in one of the most ambitious decommissioning projects in history, projected to cost around £131 billion over the next century.

A Hazardous Cleanup Operation

At the heart of this cleanup are the so-called "Legacy Waste" deposits, dating back to the facility's earliest operations. The Magnox storage ponds, initially intended as temporary solutions, house spent fuel rods, radioactive debris, and other hazardous materials, most of which remain unrecorded and present serious risks of leaks and contamination.