We've known for quite some time that the government's preferred solution to that nagging problem of all the nuclear waste currently lying around the place is to dump it in a big hole in the ground. Nice. However, they've had trouble finding anywhere in the country which has been willing to live with this waste bubbling away beneath their feet but now they've come up with the perfect solution: bribery!

Sellafield: major ongoing problems have been hidden from the public

Yesterday, Gordon Brown felt compelled to go on the record to announce that the UK needs to not only maintain but to increase its nuclear power capacity. And yet the nuclear industry is not exactly hale and hearty because, let's face it, it's been a terrible week for the poor dears.

More gloomy news from Cumbria, where yet another pall of tenebrous darkness has descended over the hapless nuclear monolith that is Sellafield. This particular cloud comes in the form of the hugely expensive and much-vaunted MOX Plant, whose job it is to turn reprocessed material (mainly in the form of plutonium and depleted uranium) into new MOX fuel.

In theory MOX, which stands for mixed oxide, can then be exported overseas and used to power some reactors in countries like France and Japan. In theory, that is. Because in practice it turns out the plant isn't producing much of anything. Apart from headaches for its operators.

Earlier in the week the nukes campaign team were lucky / unlucky (delete as appropriate) enough to be taken on a tour of Sellafield, the UK's biggest nuclear site. And it was a bit of an eye opener.

It's a massive site, covering about 4km², which meant we couldn't see everything in one go. So we spent most of our time in the vitrification plant watching high level waste being mixed with molten glass and poured into huge milk churns prior to storage (this stuff is so dangerous that if you placed a flask of it in the centre circle of a football pitch and tried to walk to it from the dug out, it would kill you before you reached it), and then in the hugely expensive Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP).

Today is the official end of the government's nuclear "consultation" (more on that coming soon). It's also the 50th anniversary of the world's second biggest nuclear disaster - at Windscale, now known as Sellafield, in West Cumbria.

Jean McSorley, a nuclear consultant, has written about the disaster in today's Guardian. It's powerful stuff, so I'm posting an extract here:

"I opened the gag-port and there it was - a fire at the face of the reactor. I thought: 'Oh dear, now we are in a pickle.'" Those were the words of the late Arthur Wilson, the instrument technician who discovered the Windscale fire on October 10 1957, in No 1 of the twin plutonium piles. It signalled the beginning of the world's second biggest nuclear reactor accident.

Despite the close attentions of coastguard ships and helicopters, not to mention an anti-terrorist task force, 30 Greenpeace activists in inflatable boats intercepted a British Nuclear Group ship this morning as it headed towards Sweden to pick up a cargo of nuclear waste. The intense level of protection around the Atlantic Osprey meant that its arrival was only delayed by an hour or so before docking at the nuclear facility at Studsvik, where it will pick up 4.8 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel, due for reprocessing at Sellafield's MAGNOX plant.