I remember arriving at Windscale for the first time on a dull damp winter day, walking up from Sellafield station feeling a sense of unease when I saw the enormous, brooding pile chimneys looming out of the mist. However when I eventually reached Calder Hall I was reassured to recognise the familiar conventional shape of the cooling towers. So I must admit to feeling some sadness at their passing. Calder Hall, the world's first commercial nuclear power station was opened in 1956 and successfully generated electricity for 47 years.

The demolition of the four 50-year-old cooling towers at Calder Hall on Saturday 29th of October only took 3 minutes, but this had been preceded by at least two years of careful planning and preparation. The Demolition Project Team had already stripped out the internal structure from the concrete shells. Miles of asbestos-cement pipe, 30,000 cubic yards of packing material, and up to 1,000 tons of timber had already been removed. Precautions had to be taken to avoid the explosions affecting other plants on site, some of which had to be shut down temporarily. For safety reasons it was necessary for the debris from the collapsing towers to fall within the footprint of the towers. This was not an easy target for towers nearly 300 ft high. Inspection revealed that the demolition, carried out by the contractors Controlled Demolition Inc. had been completely successful. This demolition is just a small step in the decommissioning of the Calder Hall reactors. The demolition of ageing facilities at Sellafield will give rise to large quantities of waste, concrete, asbestos, oil, metals etc which will have to disposed of safely.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) was established in 2005 with the objective of decommissioning and cleaning up the 20 nuclear sites in the UK safely, securely and cost effectively, protecting the present and future generations. It is estimated that the cost of this will be £73 billion during the next 100 years.