Tom Bolton, "Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations" (Strange Attractor, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Tom Bolton, author of Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations (Strange Attractor, 2025)
Date: February 11, 2026

Theme/Purpose:
This episode explores Dr. Tom Bolton’s deep dive into Britain’s nuclear power stations—both their physical landscapes and their cultural, historical, and philosophical implications. Bolton retraces his journeys to these remote sites, analyzing how Britain’s nuclear infrastructure shapes (and is shaped by) environment, memory, risk, and national identity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of the Book and Personal Motivations

• Bolton’s background: Writer focused on landscape and culture (Lost Rivers of London, Essex Coast)—attracted to overlooked or “under the radar” places. ([02:14])

• Inciting events:

  • During research for his Essex book, Bolton kept encountering Bradwell Nuclear Power Station, an enormous structure literally overshadowing its remote environment.
  • Childhood revelation: His village’s post-war expansion was tied to aircrews ready to fly nuclear deterrents; daily normality was shaped by the nuclear shadow.
    • "The combination of very, very ordinary and built into that an extreme scenario, made me think, what's really going on here?" ([03:43])

• Inextricable link between civil and military nuclear:

  • Facilities support both energy and defense infrastructure; e.g., Sizewell C is justified for both power and weapons-skill maintenance. ([05:03])

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2. The Sites Themselves: Scale, Spread, and Access

• Number and Distribution:

  • 16 nuclear generation sites in the UK—some famous (e.g., Sellafield, Hinckley Point), others virtually unknown. ([09:06])
  • Located on England, Wales (only 2), and Scotland’s edges; none in Northern Ireland or Eire. ([10:05])

• Why visit in person?

  • Desk research covers technical and regulatory issues, but physical presence reveals the emotional, architectural, and landscape experience: Where “cathedral-sized” structures meet stunning, often misunderstood, natural environments.
    • “The combination of that and a nuclear facility is, quite frankly, at times thoroughly weird.” ([13:50])

• Getting there/Access:

  • Reached via public transport and walking—generally coastal and isolated.
  • Entry is highly restricted; perimeter patrolled by the Civil Nuclear Constabulary.
    • "At Sellafield, even walking around the perimeter... is enough to attract attention." ([15:01])
  • Some visitor centers exist but are uncommon; visiting involves NDAs and only limited insight into actual operations. ([18:46])

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3. Decommissioning and the Eternal Problem of Nuclear Waste

• Dismantling process:

  • Most UK reactors (especially early Magnox and advanced gas-cooled) have ended their 40-year operating lives.
  • Decommissioning takes up to 150 years due to lengthy radioactive cooling storage.
    • "It's a timescale that doesn't really exist in public decision making outside of this context." ([21:42])

• Nuclear waste storage conundrum:

  • No permanent solution exists for high-level waste (e.g., the “Geological Disposal Facility” remains unbuilt); waste remains hazardous longer than human history.
  • Notable building: Sellafield’s B30 (“Dirty 30”), “the most dangerous building in Europe.” ([22:45])

• Philosophical and practical dilemmas:

  • Governments have commissioned philosophers to study how to warn future civilizations about nuclear sites, e.g., the “nuclear priesthood” or genetically engineered “Raycats” that would change color in radiation. ([25:42])

    • "You create markers … and it draws curiosity … We excavate stuff as archaeologists … But that mustn't happen with nuclear storage … and it's a problem we've not solved." ([25:13])

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4. Site Selection & Safety—Mistakes, Near Misses, and Design

• Original criteria:

  • Edges of country, ex-military sites, access to sea for cooling and shipping, deep-water anchorage; often repurposed airfields. ([27:24])

• Leftover traces:

  • Old runways, derelict huts, odd reuses like schools sited within reduced plant boundaries (e.g., Berkeley).

• Historical accidents:

  • Windscale fire (1957): World's worst UK nuclear accident—nearly irradiated the north of England; “luck rather than design” prevented widespread contamination.
  • Other near disasters:

    • Example: Sizewell, 2008—cracked containment pond, water loss, near core fire/explosion as occurred in Fukushima. ([31:00])

    • Many incidents covered up or only revealed much later.

    • “Every nuclear power station is, under the wrong circumstances, a nuclear bomb … we don't tend to think about it like that because really, it's a bit too alarming and difficult to deal with, I think.” ([37:35])

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5. Design, Modularity & the Future

• Early flaws vs. modern improvement:

  • Early designs (e.g., Windscale’s air-vented piles) were “terrifyingly amateur”—modern ones are highly regulated and technically competent.

  • Magnox, advanced gas-cooled, and PWR at Sizewell operated “broadly successfully,” but near-misses remain a threat. ([39:19])

    • “It’s hard to balance the industry view of effective and productive power plants with the near misses that have happened.” ([41:51])

• Next phase: Small Modular Reactors (SMRs):

  • Privately promoted as flexible, quick-to-build solutions (esp. for AI/data center power needs)—but currently unproven, with only two SMRs operating worldwide.
  • AI boom and tech industry interests are reviving the nuclear construction agenda.
  • Uncertainties abound:
    • "It's a golden age for nuclear promoters … There are lots of people invested in nuclear who want nuclear to continue regardless, really, of alternatives." ([43:51])

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6. Cultural, Philosophical, and Environmental Layers

• Unexpected overlaps:

  • Some power stations built at places rich in cultural symbolism (e.g., Winfrith, Dorset—Hardy’s Egdon Heath, Lawrence of Arabia’s grave nearby, site for both far-left and far-right imagination). ([45:55])

• Nuclear as an epoch:

  • The creation of nuclear technology marks the start of the “Anthropocene.” Radioactive isotopes now mark every continent due to testing.
    • “With that comes incredible power … nuclear power and weapons give you the means to control the world, but with that come the vast responsibilities … Nothing can ever be the same again.” ([48:33])

• Power & Fragility:

  • The invisible, abstract nature of radioactivity compounds public misunderstanding and risk denial.
  • “We know it's dangerous, but until something happens, the concept is just kind of abstract because it's invisible.” ([34:16])

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7. Final Reflections & Future Work

• Bolton’s final lesson:

  • “It's really worth looking at the things you're not supposed to look at … these places were in fact a lot more significant than I'd imagined, both in environmental terms but also in cultural terms.” ([45:55],[46:20])

• Up next for Bolton:

  • Returning to an earlier project—revising and merging his books about London’s lost rivers. ([50:36])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• "It's as though we've created an alchemy. Some of these buildings look like they're designed by giant celestial alchemists. They seem like a kind of chemistry spiraling somewhat out of control … the philosopher's stone." – Dr. Tom Bolton ([47:17])

• "Every nuclear power station is, under the wrong circumstances, a nuclear bomb … we don't tend to think about it like that because really, it's a bit too alarming and difficult to deal with, I think." – Dr. Tom Bolton ([37:35])

• "Once you've created a nuclear reactor, you have created a problem for humanity which all subsequent generations will have to deal with." – Dr. Tom Bolton ([21:03])

• "We try not to think about them. We try to keep people away from them … They look like cathedrals, but they're not at the center of our cities." – Dr. Tom Bolton ([07:13])

• "Since the first exposure of the first nuclear bomb, the Trinity Test, in 1945 in New Mexico desert, we've been in a different geological epoch, the Anthropocene." – Dr. Tom Bolton ([49:11])

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Important Timestamps

• [02:14] - Bolton’s background and formative influences
• [05:03] - Civil/military nuclear interdependency
• [09:06] - Total number and spread of UK nuclear sites
• [13:25] - Strangeness of their architectural/landscape contradictions
• [15:01] - Civil Nuclear Constabulary and access restrictions
• [20:39] - Decommissioning timescales and challenges
• [22:45] - Sellafield's high-risk status and ongoing waste management
• [25:13] - Philosophical dilemmas of nuclear waste warning
• [31:00] - Windscale fire, Sizewell near-miss, and accident secrecy
• [39:19] - Technical improvement vs. near miss risk
• [43:51] - Nuclear industry revival and AI-driven demands
• [45:55] - Cultural resonance of power station sites
• [49:11] - The Anthropocene and nuclear’s planetary legacy
• [50:36] - Bolton’s next project on London’s lost rivers

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Tone & Style

The conversation is both candid and poetic, mixing practical, technical, and historical facts with Bolton’s reflective, often philosophical insights into how overlooked infrastructure shapes the environment, society, and even human psychology. There is a sense of awe at the scale and strangeness of these sites, tempered by clear-eyed warnings about technological arrogance and the unresolved specters of nuclear power.

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Summary for Non-listeners

This episode will give you a vivid sense not only of Britain’s nuclear power stations—their locations, histories, and dangers—but also of how they loom in landscape, memory, and culture. Dr. Tom Bolton’s journeys offer insight into both the visible and invisible ways nuclear power has reshaped the contours and psychology of Britain, leaving listeners with urgent questions about legacy, risk, and what we choose to see or ignore.

Transcript

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[Dr. Tom Bolton]

New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Tom Bolton about his book titled Atomic Albion Journeys Around Britain's Nuclear Power Stations, published by strange attractor in 2025. This book has actually does what's in the title, literally. The author, Tom, who's with us today, has journeyed around Britain's nuclear power stations, some of which have at various points been quite famous. Some of these names are definitely going to be familiar to some listeners, some are way more obscure. But whether or not they're famous or obscure, or whether they're in Wales or Scotland or wherever, Tom has been to them and is here to tell us about what he saw and thought about to make sense of this kind of strange aspect of the national landscape, both really important and kind of not at the same time. There's all sorts of things for us to talk about. So Tom, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Hi Miranda, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to talk about this.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off, though, by first telling us a bit about you and why you decided to write this book?

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Yeah, so I'm a writer. I've published various books about landscape and culture, so the that includes the Lost Rivers of London or the Essex coast. But I think I'm attracted to things that perhaps fall under the radar a little. And during my coast walking for the book I did about Essex, I kept seeing a thing on the horizon and it was a structure that's out of scale to everything Else around it, in a very remote place where you wouldn't expect to see something that large or significant. That was Bradwell Nuclear Power Station. And I was drawn to that. I wanted to come back and look a little more closely at what that was doing there, because it seemed so counterintuitive to have something that's effectively the scale of a cathedral, but built in a place which makes it as unlikely as possible that people will encounter it. And that is Britain's nuclear fleets, the reactors, the power stations that were built after the Second World War, from the late 1950s onwards, and which still dominate the places that host them. The other thing that got me interested in exploring nuclear power and the nuclear industry in more detail was a realization that, that the place I grew up in, which is an ordinary village in the Midlands, in Warwickshire, not far from Stratford on Avon, had something going on that I didn't understand at the time. So the place I went to primary school and the streets around it were built in the 1950s, so an infant school, a middle school and a number of houses in a close. And that was my idea of normality. That was my baseline for what ordinary looks like. And it was only a long time afterwards that I discovered those houses and those schools had been built as part of an expansion of the village to house the crews that were coming to fly the nuclear deterrent from nearby airfields. So Gaten Airfield, down the road from Wellesbourne, which is the village I lived in, was where, for a relatively short time in the 1950s, Britain had its own independent nuclear bomb and crews ready to take off and fly that to wherever it was needed in presumably what would be a desperate situation. And the houses around the primary school had big wide drives, and the officers who occupied those houses were asked to park their cars facing outwards so they could drive off at a moment's notice, or more likely, four minutes notice if there was a four minute warning or of a nuclear attack. So the combination of very, very ordinary and built into that an extreme scenario, made me think, what's really going on here? What are these places that we've created around the country that relate to both nuclear power and nuclear weapons? And I soon realized the two things can't be separated because the nuclear industry that generates power that we use all the time around the country is, is inextricably linked to the military nuclear. So the nuclear bomb, we now carry the nuclear bomb on submarines, the submarine fleet that is always out at sea with a nuclear warhead on it, that's something that comes from the same source as nuclear power. And the two things feed each other even today. So the nuclear power station that we are expecting to build next in Britain, Sizewell C is a facility which the government has openly acknowledged it's needed partly for power, but also partly to help maintain a pool of skills around nuclear. And that pool is needed to allow us to keep running a nuclear weapons program. So my exploration of these ideas took me to all the places around the UK where these nuclear power stations have been built. And that is effectively a sort of holiday around the edges of the country. I visited all these places. My wife came with me as well. We did it together during a single summer. And it entails really going to see places that you wouldn't otherwise travel to, because they're not obvious, they're far away from large centers of population. They're in odd and sometimes quite extreme landscapes. So it gave us a sense of the country as well, its edges, its limits, and the types of place that it contains. And I think that was really the ultimate fascination of this. It's to see the places that we've put these incredible structures, structures which are both fascinating and repulsive in equal measure. So they're really quite terrifying in some ways, certainly, if you think about what power they have to do damage if something goes wrong. But at the same time, you can't help but be drawn to them because they're so different and they're built on a scale that really outdoes anything that we've achieved in this country. They are the largest things that we've constructed and incidentally, the most expensive. But this kind of fascination and repulsion go together. So we put an awful lot of money into these things. They're incredibly technologically advanced, they're very dramatic, they look amazing. And we try not to think about them. We try to keep people away from them. We try to avoid drawing attention to them because they're very, very sensitive. They have negative connotations, they draw opposition, they look like cathedrals, but they're not at the center of our cities. They're quite the opposite. And this contradiction, I think, goes through our entire attitude to nuclear power and to the thing that we created when we first split the atom more than 75 years ago.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So loads of reasons then to investigate. Thank you for giving us such a great introduction to the project. And so things for us to discuss in more detail. And there's many of those things I want us to talk about, including kind of, how do you get to these places and what are they like in the remote areas where kind of suddenly this building looms up. But before we get into any of them, sort of in specifics, can we just make sure we're clear on how many nuclear power stations we're talking about? Like it, you know, is it 2, is it 70? Like, what's the scale?

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Well, the UK has 16 nuclear generation sites. And some of those places are really well known, like Sellafield, possibly for the wrong reasons. Others are in the news more often, like Hinckley Point, where we're currently building new nuclear reactors. But equally other sites are almost entirely unknown to people who don't live in the area. And I think I've yet to find anybody who can name all 16. So it's peculiar that we have a lot of these sites, but some of them are really quite under the radar, despite being by any measure very, very large, both culturally and physically significant. So there are plenty of places that host nuclear power in Britain.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's definitely helpful to have a sense of scale. And to be clear as well, we're talking there are some in England, there are some in Wales, there are some in Scotland. They're not all just concentrated in, I don't know, Kent or something like that. There is quite a spread.

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

No, they're distributed around the edges of the country, but there are none in Northern Ireland or on the island of Ireland, and there are only two in Wales and there are three in Scotland. The rest are all.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's helpful for a spread. Now, obviously there's a number of reasons that you've already given us for why these are interesting places to think about in many ways, because we don't think about them that often. Right. And to investigate what's actually going on, there are, of course, ways to investigate and think about these things that don't require physically going there. So, I mean, I'm glad you did because now we get to talk about it. But like, why was that such a key part of what you wanted to do?

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Well, this is a travel book in many respects. So actually seeing places and understanding there physical manifestation, both the landscape and the facilities that they contain, I think is essential to understanding what they really are, because that's the bit that's hidden. So you can do desk research to understand the history of nuclear power and the arguments around it. They're often very technical and that's kind of the point. The debate around nuclear tends to be about the safety aspects of it, the regulatory requirements, the, the cost, the way that we will fund over a long period of time, what it costs to build these things, but actually the experience of them in person is completely different. It's emotional, it's a reaction to architecture and place. It's the way that we encounter and experience buildings, but heightened, because these are very unusual buildings. They are a scale that we don't often experience as humans, and they're in places that are not like our usual experience of the British landscape. I mean, this includes. It's a byproduct of putting nuclear power in places where there aren't people. That's the whole point. You put reactors away from cities because there is a risk of an accident, and if that happens, the precautionists keep it as far away from large numbers of people as possible, which in itself is unusual. There aren't many things that we do that are so dangerous you have to push them to the very edges. But that means we've got, for example, a nuclear site in Dunray. Dunray is almost as far north as the British mainland goes. There's a headland beyond it which is slightly further north, but basically it's where the land runs out and it's surrounded by the flow country, which is a huge area of bogland, sphagnum moss, bogs, which looks maybe at first glance, kind of desolate, but it's got an incredible beauty to it. It's quite inaccessible. It's a very long way from the rest of Britain, but it's a unique landscape on that scale in the uk, and we've also discovered that it's not just that, it's extremely important. So at the time when Dumais was built, it was seen essentially as wasteland and without any significant value. But we now know that the flow country contains more carbon, sequestered carbon, than all the UK's woodlands put together. So from being a landscape we probably thought was one of the least valuable in the country, our perceptions have switched. We now understand it to be perhaps the most valuable landscape in Britain. So we've ended up with power stations that built in places we thought we didn't have significance and turn out to be something different. There are other examples of this, like Dungeness, the far south of the country on the Kent coast, which is a big shingle spit. And again, at first glance, it looks like it's got nothing on it, but actually, it has a third of the UK's plant species growing there, and that wasn't something that was fully understood when we decided to build two sets of nuclear reactors there. It's a giant nature reserve. It's the second largest shingle Spit in the world after Cape Canaveral, incredibly unusual place. So around the edges, you find that there are landscapes that have incredible qualities that feel like nowhere else in the country. The combination of that and a nuclear facility is quite frankly, at times thoroughly weird.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that is really quite odd. So thank you for giving us kind of that insight into some of the contradictions that very much are apparent when one goes to these places. But as you said, they really are kind of on the edge edges of them. So, like, is it even easy to get there? Do you have to ask permission? Are there transport links? Like, how does that aspect work?

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Well, we work this out bit by bit, but Britain isn't a huge place. So remote in Britain isn't remote in the States. You know, you don't have to drive for days to get anywhere. So you can. You can get to all these places with a combination of public transport and walking. So what we tend to do was travel to the nearest town and then find a way to walk along the coast, as it usually is. They're generally coastal facilities to the site. When it comes to actually getting into the site, that's a whole different matter. Basically, you're, for the most part, definitely not allowed to do that. So at Sellafield, even walking around the perimeter of sites is enough to attract attention. There's a special police force called the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, which is entirely dedicated to protecting nuclear sites. So when we walked around the perimeter of Sellafield, we were stopped and questioned by the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, who essentially wants to know what we were doing there, which is fair enough, because there aren't many people who walk around the perimeters of nuclear power stations. And I think they're also a bit bored because there isn't a lot going on if you're a good day. Patrolling the perimeter of Sellafield is one where nothing happens. So I think they are more interested in having a chat than anything else. But they're there to keep you away, they're there to deter you from taking pictures, even though actually you're totally entitled to take pictures and to generally give a sense that you're not welcome in this place. So you can't just walk into a nuclear power station and you would have to essentially have business there to be allowed in, except for a few visitor centers. So this culture has changed quite significantly over time. Most of UK's nuclear sites are now in decommissioning, so very few of them actually generate power anymore, which is something we can talk about in more detail in a bit. But that means that there are a few which have a public face. There used to be a visitor center, for example, in Sellafield, which is a giant site. It's like a city now. It's the kind of poster site for the UK's nuclear industry, for better or for worse. And that used to have a program for school children. And school people remember being taken there in the 80s on school visits and that sort of thing. There's only I think three sites that now have visitor centers and when we were visiting it was post Covid and most of these were closed, so it took a long time to get into any of them. But we visited in the end sometime after all the researchers book tourness, which is in Scotland, it's in Lothian, it's near Edinburgh, to the east of Edinburgh. And it's somewhere that it's quite hard to describe, not least because they make you sign a non disclosure agreement before going into the building. So you can't actually write about or discuss anything that's in there in detail, which is somewhat disappointing. But. But the experience of going into one of these buildings, of going into Tournais, which is relatively modern, it was built in the complete of the late 80s is quite something because they are the largest interiors to buildings that you will ever experience. They are simply vast. If people in Britain, for example, know Tate Modern, which is the gallery on the south bank of the Thames, central London, converted from a 1930s power station that has an incredibly large space called the Turbine Hall. It's many stories high, it's quite impressive, dramatic. The space inside Tornesse was far, far larger than that. It's like nothing I've ever seen. So it's pretty jaw dropping to experience what these facilities are actually like, the scale on which they're built. It's hard to put them in context because at Torness there's nothing else nearby. It's just on the coast overlooking the Firth of Forth, several miles from the nearest town. So although it's large, you don't really get a sense of quite how large it is because there are no comparator structures, nothing to give you scale. But it really is vast and it's deeply impressive at the same time. It's an industry setup. So your tour, you're taking on a tour by people who are there to sell you the benefits of nuclear power, to give you key talking points from edf, who are the company who run all Britain's nuclear power stations. The French national power company, Electricity de France, ironically now run all Britain's nuclear power and the people who take these tours are there to recruit the kids who, who come and look around, try and get them to get more directly involved, go on training days to find out what the industry has to offer. It's not a neutral experience. You're in a place that's very tightly guarded, you're there for a reason. But nevertheless it is remarkable. So the scale on which we built this stuff is undeniably very impressive. But at the same time the culture that goes with it is undeniably rather alarming in some respects. The nature of nuclear power, which we will I'm sure talk about in a moment, and the risks that come with it are like nothing else that we have to deal with as a species.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, no, there's so much there that we definitely want to get into. But before we get into the history of kind of when they were used for nuclear power. Yes, we're going to talk about that first. You mentioned that kind of a lot of these are being decommissioned or have been decommissioned. So if they're no longer generating power, I mean, as you've made very clear to us, they're massive. What are they being used for now?

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Well, they're simply being dismantled. That's the problem with nuclear power. You have a reactor that will last for a certain amount of time and in the case of the UK's first generation reactors, the Magnox reactors and second generation, which are advanced gas cooled reactors, they've run to the end of their lives. Their lives are about 40 years, which is quite a short time period really for something that is an investment on the scale that these were. It's also quite a short time period for something that is effectively never going to go away. So we can dismantle the sites, it takes a long time. But the waste that's been produced, the high level nuclear waste in particular the fuel, that spent fuel from the reactors is incredibly dangerous and the half life of elements of that is longer than the time frame the planet will exist for. So we have to find ways to keep that safe forever. So there's no getting away from the fact that once you've created a nuclear reactor, you have created a problem for humanity which all subsequent generations will have to deal with. The actual nuclear sites themselves take a long time to dismantle anyway. It's 150 years to take down a reactor, to let it cool. It takes a long time to cool, many, many years before you can, once you've taken the fuel out before, you can then start to work on the building. It's a timescale that doesn't really exist in public decision making outside of this context. So we're thinking about 150 years ago, you're looking at the 1870s. So it's as though we were completing a plan that was put in place. This is a British reference, but under Benjamin Disraeli, he was Prime Minister in the 1870s, that, that is something we're now finishing off. That's the kind of timescale we have to work on. So all these sites, despite being redundant, will be nuclear sites, although not producing any energy or producing anything that we can use for our lifetimes and way beyond. Sellafield is where all the UK spent nuclear fuel goes to be stored. And it's the most dangerous industrial site in Europe and has some of the most dangerous and difficult buildings on it. There's a building called B30, which is known as Dirty 30, which is said to be the most dangerous building in Europe and that contains elements from Magnox reactors which will need to be disposed of permanently in future. But we have no way of disposing permanently of nuclear fuel. When we set up the industry in the late 1950s, the premise was that this could be done as long as there was a permanent solution found to the storage of high level nuclear waste. We still haven't done that. And the debates about the facility that we need to store that, it's known as the Geological Disposal Facility, some kind of underground system for packing high level nuclear waste away forever, those debates have stalled repeatedly. And the current thinking is that, well, government estimates are that if we built that, it would be the third most expensive thing built by humanity. Which always begs the question what are the other two? And the other two are the International Space Station, which kind of makes sense, and the Mecca complex in Saudi Arabia apparently, which probably tells you how much money the Saudis have from oil, which is another energy question altogether. But the problem we have with this long term storage of waste is kind of fascinating. We don't know how to deal with something that we need to communicate to generations thousands of years into the future, tens of thousands of years into the future. And beyond that, we don't have any writing that's that old. We don't have any communication systems that go back anything like the distance that we in time that we need to contemplate to communicate. The nuclear waste is going to be dangerous to generations far into the future. So there's been a lot of debate around this and it's quite philosophical. It's some of the weirdest research commissioned by government departments. So US government departments have commissioned philosophers to look into how you pass messages through generations. And one report discussed the possibility of setting up a nuclear priesthood which would communicate the message generation to generation, that a particular site was so dangerous you must never go near it. And the problem is that you create markers for places. You create, say, a big mound or a symbol and it draws curiosity. So people don't know what it means. And that meaning is almost bound to disappear over thousands of years. They dig to find out. We excavate stuff as archaeologists, we look into these mounds, we open up, we find out what they contain. But that mustn't happen with nuclear storage. That's the one thing that cannot happen. So how do you tell people that something's dangerous? How do you create a universal symbol for danger? And it's a problem we've not solved. It's a problem that really can't be solved. Some of the solutions are very entertaining. The idea that, for example, you might breed cats that had fur that changed colour in proximity to sources of radioactivity, so they acted as kind of mobile Geiger counters. I mean, no one's actually done this. It's unclear how you would. But just the theory, the idea of Raycats, as people call them, has caught the imagination. You can buy Raycat merchandise, but that doesn't really take us any further in solving this incredibly complex problem.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's definitely an issue that's very much historical and present and hugely future focused, as you've emphasized. And it's interesting to understand the extent to which this kind of was understood when these were created, but kind of also like, well, we'll figure it out at some point. Can you take us more into the sort of creation of these power stations? Like, for example, you mentioned that they're all kind of at the edges now. Britain has a lot of edges. So what were some of the criteria for choosing sort of which bit of edge would have a power plant? And did they have to be sort of cathedral sized? Like, what was that sort of thinking and planning like?

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Yeah, I mean, originally the. Well, most of these sites were ex military, so they were looking for places that were a good distance from population centers. They used us criteria but had to adapt them because we don't have the same distances available in Britain. And that was for safety reasons. Later, when reactors were developed that had concrete reactor vessels containing the reactor, they were felt to be safer. So some of those are closer to centres of population. But the first set of reactors in particular are a long way away. And the experimental ones, such as those in Dunray, even further, because they really weren't so sure about those. So when they were built, they were looking for places that had a source of cooling water, which is very important for reactors. So being on the sea makes a lot of sense. And they were looking for places that you could bring lots of heavy equipment to, to construct a reactor. So you had to have deep sea anchorage. And then actually that combination of factors, deep sea anchorage, seaside, far enough from, from population centres, that really narrows things down. So there aren't that many places that have been considered for reactors in the UK where they've not actually been built. There's a few sites that, that were debated and not continued, but by and large the ones they've chosen are the only real available options. But that means that they used a lot of ex airfields because they fitted the criteria. In a number of places, the traces of those are still really quite visible. So if you think about these plants as being very high tech, and they are, but at the same time they're also quite kind of tatty around the edges, slightly dilapidated. They look like they belong to a different era, at least in their setting. So, for example, at Bradwell in Essex, in the far Essex marshes, most remote place in the southeast of England, really, there's still the remains of the runways that the power station was built on. So the power station occupies part of the air airfield site. It's a Second World War airfield. And the rest of the site still has the concrete runways and some of the huts from the 1940s, which no one appears to have touched for 70 years. It's a weird combination of rural desolation and bits and pieces left over from completely different eras. And our top technology, very odd settings indeed. Elsewhere in, for example, Berkeley, which is on the seven estuary, you have a site that's been in decommissioning since the late 1980s. It was the first power station to close and they've reduced the site boundaries so you have the skeleton of the security fences and cameras that are no longer connected, which you can walk around. And then within that you have a school. There's a school that's been set up on the site because it was convenient and there was nowhere else in the nearby village of Berkeley to make this happen, I think. And people are always looking for other ways to reuse these sites, to create other businesses on them and to develop other uses for them. But they're overshadowed by these giant white elephants, really, these buildings that we simply have to find a way to get rid of. I mean, elsewhere on the Sellafield site, you have this, but to the power of several hundred, because there are hundreds of buildings there, each of which contains extremely dangerous nuclear waste and has to be dismantled in a bespoke and specialist way. We have ponds that are open to the elements, which contain bits of nuclear power stations from the 1950s, but no one knows what's in there because they weren't properly catalogued. There's footage of operatives using remote control grabs with toilet brushes from the local hardware store attached to the end, rubbing off the dirt from the serial numbers on these bits of kit to try and understand what they are. So we're kind of dismantling the results of our naivety, really. In a previous generation, we didn't know what we were doing with these early facilities. And what they're doing at Sellafield is building new buildings to store the stuff that's in buildings that are currently falling apart. In time, those buildings will have to be rebuilt as well. It's a constant battle to stay on top of this problem we have. And the nature of nuclear waste is a bit hard to understand. We know it's dangerous and we know why these places are dangerous, but until something happens, the concept of radioactivity is just kind of abstract because it's invisible. We can't see this thing. You can't really understand what it does to people. But spent nuclear fuel is unbelievably toxic. So if you put a piece of nuclear fuel from a reactor a kilometer away and started sprinting towards it, you'd be dead before you reached it. That's the level of toxicity we're talking about. It's simply unbelievably dangerous. So this is something that's underpinning all our nuclear power. We have this problem, this stuff that is absolutely lethal to deal with in crumbling concrete structures from the 1960s, 1970s, very, very expensive to manage this. It's a huge budget for dealing with nuclear waste. And the other thing that relates to the choice of sites is what's actually happened at them since. So although these places are designed to be in the safest locations with the least impact, if something goes wrong, it's fortunate that we haven't had an accident that's caused enormous national consequences. We've come very close indeed. So the worst nuclear accident that took place in the UK was in 1957, the Windscale fire. Windscale is what the Sellafield site was called, but they changed the name partly because of the consequence of the windscale fire and public awareness of what had happened there. So there were two nuclear piles there, windscale pile one, pile two, which were just there to create materials for the nuclear bombs. So they produced plutonium for the A bomb and then tritium for the hydrogen bomb. Britain was in a race to develop its own independent nuclear deterrent at the time before, well, to keep up with the US and the Soviet Union. And it was very experimental technology. The pile one caught fire and it was an air vented pile, which meant that that the radioactivity simply went up the chimney. There was a filter at the top which was an afterthought. Very fortunate because without that filter, the fire might well have irradiated much of the north of England. It's just chance you know which way the wind was blowing. If it was blowing the wrong way, it could simply have made a whole chunk of Britain uninhabitable. And it's luck that didn't happen because the filter was much derided. It was seen as expensive and unnecessary and it didn't actually work the way it was intended to anyway. So it was fortune rather than design. That meant that that kept radioactivity out of the air and prevented a much bigger disaster than actually took place. As it was, a lot of radioactivity was spread around the local area, which was covered up for a generation. So that's relatively well known. But there are other incidents which are equally alarming and could have led to massive consequences. So, for example, in 2008 at Sizewell on the Suffolk coast, Sizewell, a power station, was being decommissioned, as it still is. And a worker over the weekend wondered why there was water pooling on the floor of the laundry room. And after investigation, it was discovered there was a crack in the reactor containment pond and the water that cools the reactor was flowing out. And if it had been left to flow over the weekend and hadn't been discovered, it would probably have drained the reactor, which would have led to the core heating up, potentially catching fire and exploding. And that's what happened at Fukushima because of different causes, but same effect, the cooling water disappeared, which causes the reactor to spiral out of control. If that had happened, that would have had enormous consequences for Britain, because a fire or an explosion that spreads radioactivity will make it potentially impossible to live in an area for a very long period of time. It will cause enormous costs, social disruption and probably significant numbers of deaths. So we don't have a lot of space in Britain, and if something like that happened, there'd be not a lot of coming back from it. And there are other incidents too where there have been accidents that have been covered up. This is rarely stuff that's discussed openly when it happens. So we have a lot of risk attached to these facilities. I mean, reactors across the world are like this. As we know from the Ukraine, the Zaporizhzha nuclear power plant is now a political football, because if you turn the power off, as happened over the new year, for several days, what you have is effectively a ticking bomb. So as soon as a nuclear power station loses power, it's a countdown to a disaster that you can't come back from. Power is absolutely essential. These things have to have electricity to stay safe, otherwise they are no longer safe. And every nuclear power station is, under the wrong circumstances, a nuclear bomb. So we don't tend to think about it like that because really, it's a bit too alarming and difficult to deal with, I think. So these structures are both oddly beautiful and some lovely and dramatic architecture around nuclear and simply too terrifying to consider on a daily basis, I would say.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Experian. Yeah, that definitely makes sense. The combination is fascinating and obviously some of it is just sort of intrinsic to what is actually being done right, as you said, like they need electricity to not be as dangerous. You know, that's just a fact, no matter where the plant is or how it was built. Same with nuclear waste. You also talk about in the book that there are some ways in which the design and architecture of the plants themselves can also sort of influence the extent to which they are or not as dangerous. I mean, obviously the big dangers you've already clarified are kind of there no matter what, but maybe you can tell us about some of the key design aspects, including some of the flaws that are there for some, at least for the power stations you've visited.

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Yeah, I mean, I think from a safety point of view, we regulate them extremely well. So it's not that they have Inherent design flaws. That's not something we have anymore. The windscale piles they did, they were terrifyingly amateur in retrospect. And they had this system of pushing fuel canisters out of this graphite core. So they were pushed into holes in an enormous block of graphite that was a couple of stories high at least. And once they were spent, these fuel rods were pushed out the other side of the graphite core where they dropped into a pool of water. And if you put source of radioactivity underwater, it keeps them safe. It's counterintuitive really, but if they're underwater, the radioactivity doesn't pass out. But some of these fuel canisters weren't landing in the pool. It turned out some were becoming lodged on ledges in the reactor and there was, there was radioactivity being emitted on a regular basis for a couple of years before the fire happened. I mean, that sort of design floor is, is quite frankly bizarre. And I think that speaks to how little we knew about what we were doing at the start of the nuclear era. And that's something that we have fortunately learned from because that's simply untenable. So the power station designs that we've used, Magnox, which was the first generation of nuclear reactors, and then the advanced gas cooled reactors that came later, and then a third generation of which we only have one, the pressurized water reactor in Sizewell, those have all operated broadly successfully. They've generated power over a long period of time. So nuclear power isn't a disaster as a technology by any means, it's a success. It's something that has driven the UK power grid for 50 years. And we still use nuclear power for a small but important proportion of our electricity generation. So on some levels, these facilities are effective ways of doing what they've been designed to do. They have delivered. I think it's hard to balance the industry view of effective and productive power plants with the near misses that have happened. The near misses, I think are something that's a very, very hard to justify. But that's the nature of the technology. If you build them, that's what you're going to end up with. You're going to end up with situations where it's human error that can cause things to go wrong, as opposed to any inherent design flaws. Where this comes in and is very current though, with debates that are happening around nuclear at the moment is with the next generation of technology, which is small modular reactors. So it's interesting that during the course of writing this book, When I started, nuclear was really on the back burner. It wasn't widely discussed. There'd been various attempts to build new conventional power stations in the UK and they've been hard to fund. The Chinese had got involved and then government decided they didn't want Chinese funding in critical national infrastructure. So it was possible to believe we wouldn't ever build another nuclear power station. But now there is a whole new tranche of private companies who are promoting their own bespoke technologies in the form of smaller, more replicable nuclear facilities. And this is driven entirely by AI. So AI and the data centers that are required to power it need a lot more electricity than we currently have available. All the big tech companies in the States, without exception, have invested huge amounts of money in developing nuclear power for their data centers. Thing is, though, none of these reactors are currently operational. There are only two small multi reactors in operation in the world, one in Russia and one in China. So the promises that come with this technology are at the moment totally theoretical, but there aren't any other solutions. If AI is to deliver the things everyone has been obsessively discussing over the last couple of years, it needs this power and it's not coming from anywhere else. So suddenly we have this situation where we need nuclear to work, we need more of it, we need to work more effectively and we need to be safer, we need to be cheaper, we need to be replicable, we need it to be something that can be delivered on budget. None of these things have been characteristics of the nuclear industry up till now. I think there's a lot of smoke and mirrors around the idea of small modular reactors. People are making wildly extravagant promises. There's been discussion, for example, of building 12 reactors at Hartlepool, which is northeast England, where there's currently a conventional nuclear power station. I don't think anyone understands what that entails, what kind of space that might take up what 12 reactors look like, never mind whether the technology that's been proposed to run them is actually going to work in the way it's intended. It's a golden age for nuclear promoters. And there is a nuclear industry now fundamentally privatized, which wasn't the case until the 1980s, which has a huge interest in promoting itself, in making sure it has a future. There are lots of people invested in nuclear who want nuclear to continue regardless, really, of alternatives, of whether it's the best option in terms of the planet and our big choices about where we take society. So smrs, as they're known, are extraordinarily Current, and that's a very recent development. And I think what happens in relation to that technology will determine the future of nuclear and perception of nuclear power for a long time to come.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, it's definitely incredibly current now and very much more in the public debate than it was even just a few years ago. And you've raised a number of issues that need to be addressed going forward and the public does need to be more aware of. Is there anything else that we want to add to our discussion before we conclude?

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

I think that it's really worth looking at the things you're not supposed to look at. That's my conclusion from, from this exercise. So that applies on lots of different levels. In terms of travel, it was an amazing experience visiting places that were simply somewhat under the radar. And a lot of these places were in fact a lot more significant than I'd imagined, both in environmental terms but also in cultural terms. So, for example, the power station at Winfrith on the Dorset Heathlands is like a focus for ideas of idealised England. Lots of different thinkers have lived nearby, but it's the site of Thomas Hardy's Egdon Heath, which is a kind of mythic landscape based on a very real Dorset landscape. It's a place of transfiguration, of change. There's a village nearby which was abandoned, called Tynem for military range. And people have written about that as a moment that was stopped in time. A place that shows us what Britain could have been if we'd gone down a different path. It's attracted far right thinkers and actual Neo Nazis, really. It's attracted people who are idealists on the left as well. This place is where Lawrence Arabia T Lawrence was killed on his motorbike after his life had kind of fallen apart and he returned to the UK in an accident. So it's a place that carries lots and lots of cultural weight. And at the center of this location, which is one of the most kind of freighted of a myth that you could find in southern England, there is this power station complex and it's full of strange experimental reactors called things like Dragon and Nestor, which were development reactors testing out different types of technology. It's almost as though we've created an alchemy. Some of these buildings look like they're designed by giant celestial alchemists. They're like crucibles. They seem like a kind of chemistry spiraling somewhat out of control. And the thing about nuclear power is that it kind of is. It is the philosopher's stone. It's the thing that we were seeking. It's the breakthrough. It gives us enormous power. So spitting the atomic, breaking matter apart, it's almost the most fundamental thing you can do to existence. We've created a whole different level of science that transcends anything that we had before. And with that comes incredible power. So nuclear power and weapons give you the means to control the world, but with that come the vast responsibilities that come with that kind of power. So we've created a situation where nothing can ever be the same again. Since the first exposure of the first nuclear bomb, the Trinity Test, in 1945 in the New Mexico desert, we've been in a different geological epoch, the Anthropocene. This is what is generally agreed, that from that moment, the Anthropocene began, the epoch during which mankind is the greatest influence on the future of the planet. There are radioisotopes in every continent, including Antarctica. From nuclear testing, from nuclear explosions, we've made our mark everywhere. And that means that our futures are determined by what happened then. And one thing about that is that we can't see. We can't see the future in the same way, because we know it's contingent. We know it could end at any moment. Whatever else is happening, we know that now we have nuclear weapons, which nuclear power is inseparable, that there may be no future, that everything could finish. And we can't get away from that. So it's changed every aspect of the way we experience our lives. The way that people live, the way that they think, the way that they plan. It's all in the context of this astonishing breakthrough of this piece of alchemy. I think it's a lesson in being very careful what you wish for.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, definitely. Something to be much, much more aware and careful of than I think the general public usually is. And so definitely something you're still thinking about, but is it something you're still working on? You mentioned this project, in some ways came out of your previous project, Walking Through Essex. Has this sparked any new ideas as anything you're currently working on, you want to give us a sneak preview of?

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Well, I'm currently going back to something I produced previously. So I've written two books about lost London rivers following their courses through the streetscape of modern London. And they were written in one case 15 years ago, so I'm updating them and producing a single volume. So both of them brought together new, completely revised, updated versions, which has me walking all these routes again, which is interesting in itself. It's a bit like a ritual. You walk the same routes repeatedly over a long period of time and it kind of anchors you in the city. It shows you what's constant and what isn't. It gives you a perspective on change. So it becomes about more than these rivers, although the rivers themselves which flow beneath the streets of London are fascinating enough. This landscape that is still there that we've hidden away but refuses to vanish. So that's my next project. I need to get on with that and ideally something will get printed before the end of this year also by Strange Retractor.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, that certainly sounds absolutely fascinating. So maybe you'll come back and tell us about that when it's done. But of course, in the meantime listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Atomic Journeys Around Britain's Nuclear Power Stations, published by strange attractor in 2025. Tom, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Tom Bolton]

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.