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That must be why the Windscale reactor in the UK was still sitting with fuel in it since the 1957 accident until just this year - and decommissioning and cleanup can only now proceed.

You really don't have a clue, do you? Windscale was sealed off because 11 metric tons of radioactive material combined with massive quantities of flammable graphite burned the structure to the ground. As much cleanup as possible was done with the materials, including removal of as many fuel rods as was safe at the time. After that, it was capped for safety and left to sit.

Full decommissioning started in the 80's. The problem wasn't a matter of radiation (the materials had decayed down to ~1% of their original radioactivity), the problem was the safety of a heavy industrial structure that had suffered extreme damage. All that planning that went into the decommissioning was to prevent on-site accidents due to structural issues, prevent accidental release of the remaining isotopes, prevent fires from breaking out (remember, the graphite is probably still flammable having been sealed off from oxygen), and to acquire the necessary heavy machinery to make it happen.

TMI's reactor (which was in much better condition) was entered by humans a year later. The reactor head was removed 5 years after the incident. Defueling began 6 years after the incident.

Surely Scotland would be the most logical place.

You must be thinking of Dounreay. The reactors there are now closed, and it will only take another 30 years or so to clean up the site.

Perhaps Sellafield was chosen as a site because the English did not want their weapons grade plutonium manufacturing plant to be in the hands of the Scots. The fire in Windscale reactor 1 in 1957 did bring its plutonium manufacturing to an end. It also left us with a dead contaminated reactor, and no real idea how to clean it up nearly 50 years later.

in 1986 at least it was one of the few places in England where the familiar "bobby" (policeman) carries serious fire power.

The local bobby won't have been a bobby as such, but a member of the UK atomic energy authority's constabulary. As far as I'm aware they're the only police force operating on a nationwide basis where all the officers are armed.

Look here For a video covering the decommisioning of a small experimental Oxford reactor. Very Very scary (especially pushing graphite blocks into a shredder with no more protection than blue gloves!

The BBC hasn't been a monopoly since 1955, and no, it's not a function of Government, there is no minister for the BBC nor is there a chain of command within government in charge of managing the Beeb. We have agencies, lots of them, but the BBC isn't amongst them.

It's an independent public body incorporated via a Royal Charter. Just because it appears soft-left doesn't mean this is encouraged or engineered by Government, it's much to their annoyance in fact, take the Dr. Kelly affair or their war coverage from last year for example.

The other use of this technique is for diversion and camouflage; a classic example occured after a graphite-moderated, air-cooled(!) nuclear reactor at Windscale in the UK caught fire in 1957 and released a significant amount of radioactive pollution. The site was subsequently renamed Sellafield.

Looks as though the folks at Caldera may be using the "Sellafield solution".

Modula-2 or Ada or Logo I have not seen a wisper about in years. from what I recall Logo was to be the teaching language of the future ( back in the mid 80's ), Ada was to be the next big thing is the 80's, and modula-2 was to replace C

The first language I programmed in was FORTRAN II back in the 60's, when I was under 10. The code had to be run at the Nuclear Research Establishment at Harwell in the UK. Remember, there weren't as many computers around back then, maybe 10 in the country. It made being a pre-teen 31337 haX0r difficult. :-)

The last time I programmed in FORTRAN - FORTRAN 77 in fact - was for the communications facilities for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, a system to help restore power in case of emergency. That was in 1987.

I still use Ada - recently for the spaceflight avionics for a scientific research satellite, and will be teaching a course in it to some people doing the avionics for a helicopter in a couple of weeks. Though the use of Ada has shrunk, it's making a strong comeback in the field of avionics, where a crash in the program could mean the crash of an aircraft.

My advice to the original poster - by all means learn FORTRAN as a fifth- or sixth- language. Even the 95% Godawful languages(VB..) can teach you something. There are times I use Java and think "why the HECK can't it have feature X of Ada-95?". There are times with Ada-95 that I say "Damn, feature Y is so clumsy compared with Java." FWIW Matlab seems to be the way of the future for non-software engineers to quickly do calculations and display the results graphically, it's a pretty good FORTRAN replacement. What EXCEL is to accountants, Matlab is to scientists.