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This article informs that British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) is to build a handling facility at Sellafield in response to its growing mixed-oxide (mox) fuel business. The first mox shipment since 1999's data falsification scandal was delivered to Swiss generator NOK earlier this month, 12 years after plans for the controversial £500 million Sellafield Mox Plant (SMP) were revealed. BNFL has issued an invitation to tender for the design, test and construction of a transport flask loading and handling facility.

The article reports that British Nuclear Fuels reached a major landmark in mid-March, making significant steps towards cleaning up one of its oldest problem sites at its Sellafield reprocessing plant on the Cumbrian coast and using world-leading technology in the process. The task was to empty the first and oldest of six 50- year-old tanks and to transfer the contents to a modern container. If that doesn't sound like much of an achievement, those contents are hundreds of cubic metres of radioactive sludge, some of which dates back to the 1950s, which has solidified in the intervening years to a consistency somewhere between toothpaste and clay.