Features

At  9:00am on Saturday 29 September the four cooling towers that have stood guard over the Calder Hall nuclear power station were razed to the ground, forever changing the landscape in this part of West Cumbria.

The end of Calder A & B cooling towers

Calder Hall was the world's first commercial nuclear power station, officially opened by Her Majesty the Queen, on Wednesday 17th October 1956.

The station had, for 47 years, been producing electricity, enough in total to power the whole of England and Wales for three months!

The power station started construction some three years earlier, in 1953, with plans just to build one reactor. This was soon changed to two reactors. Then in June 1955 plans were put in place to add two more reactors to the site. This meant that there were two identical power stations at Calder Hal: Calder A and Calder B.

The Queen opens Calder Hall

The demolition of the cooling towers is one of the first major milestones in the decommissioning of the site.

Radio Cumbria

We'll be at the demolition of the towers on Saturday morning with the BBC Bus and broadcasting live in to Val Armstrong's programme and taking photos and video for you to see here. And if you've taken any photos of the event you'ld like to share, why not send them to cumbria@bbc.co.uk and we'll add them to our galleries.