A look inside the Dounreay Fast Reactor

Dounreay is one of the strangest places in Britain. It’s literally on the edge of things, isolated in bleakly beautiful landscape on the Caithness cliffs at the extreme north of Scotland, where the mainland starts to fray into the islands of the Orkneys, the 1950s high-tech of its buildings and technology make it seem more like something from science fiction than reality: a James Bond villain’s lair or an early Doctor Who view of the future. It seems like a future which didn’t happen, although as we explain in this issue, breeder reactors whose design is partly based on the Dounreay facilities may be about to return to the UK to handle the country’s nuclear legacy.

The decommissioning of the breeder reactors of Dounreay has now reached a fascinating stage: the engineers have inserted nitrogen-cooled robotic video cameras into the first of the breeders to become functional — the Dounreay Fast Reactor, which is housed within the site’s most iconic structure, the ‘golf ball’ dome. The video cameras are providing the first images for over half a century of the internals of the reactor: ghostly pictures of the breeder elements which are jammed in place, their steel swollen by the neutron radiation, a problem unanticipated when the reactor was built.