SIXTY years ago today Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II opened the world’s first full-scale nuclear power station at Sellafield.

Delegates from 48 countries gathered at the nuclear site on the Cumbrian coast, at a grand event that would see Her Majesty cut a ribbon that would transform the nuclear industry, and a small farming community, overnight.

Calder Hall led the way for the UK in the use of nuclear fuel to generate electricity, and was the first in the world to be connected to the national grid.

A further 14 reactors were built across the UK, in exact replica of the design, along with a further two stations in Italy and Japan.

Covering over 43 acres of the Sellafield site on the coast of Cumbria, the station has the same sized footprint as Buckingham Palace and its grounds.

It is currently being decommissioned with the complex clean-up of the facility well underway.

When the station stopped generating electricity in 2003, all four of the reactors were full of fuel that would, after a period of cooling, need to be treated in the Magnox reprocessing plant.

The four iconic cooling towers had dominated the Sellafield and West Cumbrian skyline for more than half a century before they were demolished in September 2007. The explosive demolition was three years in the planning to ensure that when the towers were imploded they would fall within their own footprint

In 2010, Sellafield Ltd completed what was, at the time, the biggest asbestos removal project in Europe. The material was stripped from Calder’s heat exchangers, turbine halls and associated buildings. In all, 2,300 tonnes of asbestos cladding was removed in five years.

A project to transfer the 40,000 fuel rods from the four reactors to the Fuel Handling Plant started in 2011. One of the reactors is now completely empty and the remaining three are on course to be empty by 2019.

Current plans indicate that by 2027, only the four reactor buildings will be left of the original Calder Hall station. The reactor buildings will be dismantled to the point where only the concrete bio-shield that contains the reactor core remains.