Doureay....

it was one of our very first Nuclear power stations... ran out of operational life some time ago and in a desperate attempt to find a new use for it ( and therefore avoid haveing to pay for the immense cleanup costs asssociated with shutting it down completely).. the idea was floated of turning it into a re-processing centre.

Essentially the accident centred on a problem common to every reactor ever built... What do you do with the huge tonnages of waste it produces?

The Dounreay Solution was to tip it down shafts tunneled into the granite on sea cliffs nearby.

this started about 1968.. and in secret.

In 1977 the shaft exploded, blowing off a 12 ton "Cap" and scattering nuclear material far and wide.. including into the sea and on the beaches below.

This accident was kept a state secret too.

Probable cause of the accident? Water working it's way into the shaft and being turned too high pressure steam by the heat from the waste and by chemical reaction with it.

http://www.cndscot.dial.pipex.com/power/porridge.htm

As for building "Fail-Safe" nuclear reactors............well they are hideously expensive now and take forever too build as it is

So they will become more expensive too build and take even longer to build.... and you are still left with the problem of what to do with the waste... A problem no-one has solved in over fifty years of use.

The article I read on the US Utility corportion buying up a British privatized one must have been published around the early to mid nineties... so would have reffered to events before that.... I take two mainstream british newspapers... niether of which keeps online databases dateing back beyond 1998:(

I've tried searching for the info useing a number of keywords "US Utility" "Nuclear safety". "Failed NRC inspections".even tried searching via " US Corporration plane fatalities." found a huge amount of astonishing info on all those fields, includeing the fact that over 100 of the US civil nucler power stations have failed routine safety inspections recently.... plus a number of fatalities involving nuclear accidents in the US.

http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html#power

. but no-one seems to publish much about events prior to the mid\late 90's... after which most media organisations became aware of the web and started putting thier output online.