John Laing & Son Ltd won the contract to build the country's first plutonium factory in 1948. It was built on the site of the wartime factory at Sellafield. This image is one of the first images of production and is accompanied by the caption: "The completed primary separation plant at Windscale with the Solvent Recovery plant and Workshops in the foreground. This plant is used to treat the irradiated slugs from the pile, lumps of uranium so radioactive that a human being must not be allowed to approach them; these slugs contain the desired plutonium in about the same proportion as there is gold in gold ore. Every ton of slugs produces only a few ounces of plutonium."
This image was catalogued in 2013 as part of a pilot project funded by the John Laing Charitable Trust.
This is part of the Series: JLP01/12 John Laing Photographic Collection Colour Transparencies; within the Collection: JLP01 John Laing Photographic Collection
Source: Historic England Archive
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