"The availability of uranium to the UK was reasonably secure; but what the UK didn't have was enrichment technology, which was in the United States," recalls Laurence Williams, professor of nuclear safety at the University of Central Lancashire.
LAURENCE WILLIAMS: I have been monitoring it for the last couple of weeks and there's certainly three reactors seem to be more or less unchanged from initially when they got into the seawater cooling into them.
"The water can be put through an ion exchange system to take out radionuclides like caesium. That is relatively easily done; the technology is available to do that," explained Laurence Williams, another British professor of nuclear safety, at the John Tyndall Institute. "The caesium is removed a