Changes to the Sellafield Visitor Centre are expected shortly when control of the Centre’s exhibits returns temporarily to British Nuclear Fuels. The Science Museum, which has operated the Centre since 2002 has confirmed that, in advance of the Centre being taken over on 1st April next year by the newly formed Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), BNFL is seeking to regain control of the exhibition in late October this year.
Following a £6.5M revamp, and the transfer of editorial control to the Science Museum in 2002, the centre was transformed from the brash and much criticised home of the Mighty Atom to the Science Museum’s balanced ‘warts and all’ Sparking Reaction exhibition. As well as hosting what was dubbed as Europe’s first Immersion Cinema – where visitors enter a virtual world in which they can make their own decisions on energy policies – the Sparking Reaction exhibition also includes exhibits donated by environment groups, mostly in the form of anti-nuclear T-shirts, stickers and badges etc.
The Science Museum has said it understands that BNFL wishes to regain editorial control of the exhibition in order to put it into the right shape for the NDA which assumes ownership and responsibility for Sellafield and site operations next year. Alterations to the exhibition are expected to be confined largely to reflecting recent changes to BNFL’s corporate structure. However, observers will watch with interest to see whether the current impartiality initiated by the Science Museum in 2002 is maintained or whether, under the NDA, there will be a return to the heavily-spun pro-nuclear high-jinks of the Mighty Atom.
A Visitor Centre, in the form of a modest on-site information centre, was first established at Sellafield in 1982. Subsequently moved off-site and with the emphasis on ‘fun rather than fact’, an enlarged and refurbished centre adopted the role of a theme park to which schools in the region were transported free of charge. Despite being described by the press as an apologia for the nuclear industry, the Mighty Atom centre attracted around 150,000 visitors per year. Today, visitor numbers are down to around 80,000 per year.