The National Graphene Institute building

Dalton Cumbrian Facility

  • What does the future hold for Sellafield?

    What does the future hold for Sellafield?

    How can you predict the future 100 or 1,000 years from now? It’s a question Sellafield researchers and scientists have to ask. Now, a new exhibition will help to visualise the unknown future of the nuclear power plant.

  • Guest post: A nuclear legacy – visiting Chernobyl 32 years on

    Guest post: A nuclear legacy – visiting Chernobyl 32 years on

    As part of my work at the Dalton Cumbrian Facility, I had the opportunity to visit Chernobyl last month. There are few people working in the nuclear industry who don’t know what happened at the power plant near the town of Pripyat, in what is now the Ukraine, 32 years ago this week. For those…

  • Guest post: Research with global impact in a stunning location

    Guest post: Research with global impact in a stunning location

    I work in a place where robots roam the hallways, chemists explore radioactive materials and physicists work with the world’s most powerful dual-beam particle accelerator. Located between the Irish Sea and the beautiful Lake District National Park, the Dalton Cumbrian Facility is a satellite site for the University of Manchester’s Dalton Nuclear Institute. It is…

  • 100 years on, marking Rutherford’s breakthroughs

    100 years on, marking Rutherford’s breakthroughs

    Did you know that Manchester is the birthplace of modern nuclear physics? It was created right here by Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues, and this year marks a century since Rutherford initiated the first artificial nuclear reaction. And that wasn’t the end of the team’s breakthroughs. Between 1914 and 1919, Rutherford led many experiments in…

  • Expert comment – Have we forgotten what nuclear weapons really are?

    Expert comment – Have we forgotten what nuclear weapons really are?

    As the Cold War fades into history, fewer and fewer people remember what life was like lived under the ever-present threat of nuclear warfare. Indeed, even during the Cold War years, the reality of nuclear weapons was downplayed. Atmospheric testing was banned in 1963, driving tests underground – out of sight and out of mind…

  • Nuclear power: playing the long game

    Nuclear power: playing the long game

    When it comes to the nuclear power industry, you’ll always be playing the long game. So, when you’re considering its future, you need to think long-term. And one topic occupying the minds of people in the nuclear power industry right now is the future of its power source. Uranium, a silver-grey coloured heavy metal that…