British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) owns and operates eight Magnox nuclear power stations in England, Wales and Scotland, including Calder Hall at Sellafield, west Cumbria.
Calder Hall was the world's first commercial-scale nuclear power station and was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth on October 17th, 1956.
Calder Hall now generates enough electricity to supply a city the size of Leeds. The Magnox power stations provide about 8 per cent of the UK's electricity.
The main activity at the Sellafield site, also home to the THORP reprocessing plant, is recycling used fuel from nuclear power stations worldwide.
It is one of two main recycling plants in the world. The other is at La Hague, near Cherbourg in France.
More than 10,000 people are employed on the Sellafield site, 6,200 of them as full-time employees and 4,000 as contract staff, according to British Nuclear Fuels.
The production of mixed oxide fuel (MOX), a mixture of uranium and plutonium oxides recovered from reprocessing, has formed a major new business for the Sellafield plant.
A demonstration MOX manufacturing facility has been operating commercially since 1993.
So far, Japan has been the largest customer for MOX fuel. BNFL has also made MOX fuel for Switzerland and Germany.
BNFL is still waiting to receive government permission to open a new stg£400 million full-scale MOX plant with a capacity of 120 tonnes a year.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/SJQTLMCMMRC2PLALXUKEWWS6HU.png)