A fire broke out in the early hours in a building at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) site at Dounreay in Caithness.
The alert was raised at 1.30am, with the site’s own fire brigade deployed to the prototype fast reactor’s sodium tank farm.
Crews were stood down within 30 minutes and there were no injuries, with work on the tank farm stopped for the time being.
Dounreay Site Restoration Limited (DSRL) confirmed this morning that the NDA and appropriate regulators have been informed about the incident
A spokesman said: “The reactor ceased operating in 1994 and is more than halfway through a process of being decommissioned.
“More than 1,500 tonnes of sodium, a material used when the reactor was in operation, has been safely destroyed so far.
“The fire was in a building where tanks are used to store sodium, and work to dispose of the remaining sodium has been suspended to allow for an investigation into the fire.”
