Monumental task

Just about as far north as you can go without falling off mainland Britain, the landscape is bleakly spectacular. Rolling, windswept hills finish abruptly in jagged cliffs, pounded by Atlantic breakers. And sitting on the edge of the cliffs is the famous Golf Ball sphere of Dounreay — the site for the UK's experimental fast reactor programme, and now the location for one of the world's largest, trickiest, nuclear decommissioning programmes.

Dounreay has always aroused strong emotions. In the 1950s, it was a symbol of the UK's ambition to be at the forefront of nuclear technology. After the US government declared data from the Manhattan Project classified, UK physicists began their own experiments on plutonium and teamed up with engineers to build the world's first electricity-generating fast reactor in just three years.

In the 1960s and 1970s Dounreay's technological achievements were overshadowed by suspicions about nuclear power, with stories of missing plutonium, unauthorised discharges of radioactive substances, and explosions in waste shafts. In the 1980s and 1990s the site was condemned as a White Elephant. And now, the long task of clean-up is well under way — a job that will take many times longer than it took to build the site.