A blot on the landscape

What a beautiful day travelling down through Wales to our Pembrokeshire home for the next week. So many opportunities for blips today - especially with the sun shining. 

In the end, I’ve gone for this. A pastoral scene of cows grazing against peaceful landscape marred by the decommissioned nuclear power station. I mean, where better to place this piece of brutalist design? 

Decommissioned it may be, but it does apparently have a future - though it’s a little beyond my limited scientific understanding. 

Plans have been confirmed to make a former nuclear power plant in north Wales the lead project for the decommissioning of former Magnox stations in the UK.


Trawsfynydd, which had two 195-MW gas-cooled Magnox reactors, is on a 15-hectare site, on an inland lake in Snowdonia National Park, North Wales. 


It started service in 1965 and generated 69 TWh of electricity over the 26 years until its closure in 1991.
The twin reactors at the site will now become the very first in the UK to be fully decommissioned.


In 2016 a committee of MPs said the Trawsfynydd site should be designated as a site for a first-of-its kind small modular reactor station in the UK.


The development company - to be known as Cwmni Egino - will help exploit the economic benefits of small modular reactors and associated technologies on site, including the potential for a medical research reactor, to provide a secure and sustainable supply of medical radioisotopes for Wales, the UK and Europe.
The exploitation of this technology would not only bring direct economic benefits to the Trawsfynydd area but also to the wider region - supporting the case for the thermo-hydraulic testing facility at M-SParc on Anglesey and generating work for the AMRC Cymru facility on Deeside.