In the land of honey, lamb and nuclear waste.

I had the opportunity recently to visit the first nuclear power station ever constructed in Spain. The plant at Zorita, deep in the Alcarria hills about an hour from Madrid, is surrounded by a rolling rural landscape of majestic beauty, a region made famous by the Spanish writer Camilo Jose Cela in his book Journey to the Alcarria. This is a land of honey and lamb. It is also a land of nuclear waste.

The Zorita plant is in the process of being dismantled after four decades in service. Enresa, the state company overseeing the job, provided a guided tour of the site. The main fuel rods have been removed and safely stored but the four-year project has just begun and there are many areas of the plant that remain radioactive and out of bounds.

This is a huge job that involves removing the entire plant to leave a greenfield site. In essence, it is waste management on an industrial scale. Pretty much everything here is toxic in one form or another, and Enresa's task is to ensure it is all safely removed. It is a methodical, carefully-calculated process that will dispose of an estimated 1,004 tonnes of waste, of which around four tonnes will be radioactive. It is possible because four decades ago when the plant began operating in 1966, someone had the foresight to charge a levy on every home and business that purchased electricity. A dismantling fund was thus built up over the years. Incredibly, even through lean times, the fund remained untouched.


Parts of the plant remain in operation while the dismantling process continues. We visited the main control room, where for 30 years operators had monitored the nuclear reactor and provided electricity for the national grid.

We met Ramon, who had worked there for over 30 years and confessed to being sad that the plant had come to the end of its lifespan. He talked us through a basic day at the plant and pointed out the various control panels, including a meteorological station, pictured below, which provided up to the second weather information and, in the event of a leak, would have enabled staff to predict the direction of a radioactive cloud.

From the plant, we drove to the nearby village of Pastrana for lunch, picking up some of the region's world class honey en route. During the visit there had been inevitable gags about radioactivity and how we were all going to get contaminated. No chance of that, of course. In any event, the real danger that day was cholesterol, not spent uranium.

We sat down to a heavy lunch at a roadside grill in Pastrana. The meal started with plates of cold meats and Manchego cheese, followed by migas, which are basically bread crumbs fried with chorizo and black pudding to make a fatty, greasy, delightful stodgy mess, served with hunks of deep fried bread. Not one to eat too often!

That first assault was followed by dishes of black pudding and scrambled egg, served with pine nuts and more hunks of fried bread. They were accompanied by wooden dishes piled high with boiled octopus drowned in olive oil and liberally sprinkled with paprika and salt. This was pulpo a la gallega, and it tasted good. We washed it all down with some red wine, not sure where from but it was rough on the palate and provided a good, sharp antidote to the grease.

To finish off the meal, we had a choice of lamb or kid, as in, baby goat. I went for the kid, which I'd only tried once or twice before. It's full a flavour, stronger then lamb and more fatty. I drew the ribcage unfortunately, which meant a 30-minute struggle to shave the meat off the bones. Leg next time, methinks...

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