Sellafield's presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site podcast, Hinkley Point: the dreadful deal behind the worlds most expensive power plant, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. 45,907. Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste. Compared to the longevity of nuclear waste, Sellafield has only been around for roughly the span of a single lunch break within a human life. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. Eventually, the plant will be taller than Westminster Abbey and as part of the decommissioning process, this structure too will be torn down once it has finished its task, decades from now. Weve got folks here who joined at 18 and have been here more than 40 years, working only in this building, said Lisa Dixon, an operations manager. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. In comparison, consider how different the world looked a mere 7,000 years ago, when a determined pedestrian could set out from the Humber estuary, in northern England, and walk across to the Netherlands and then to Norway. "It's not fancy technology, it's not somebody from Oxford that's come up with this, says Richard Edmondson, operations manager at Sellafield, standing beside a looming stack of the concrete monoliths. The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. The solution, for now, is vitrification. It all put me in mind of a man whod made a house of ice in deepest winter but now senses spring around the corner, and must move his furniture out before it all melts and collapses around him. At one point, when we were walking through the site, a member of the Sellafield team pointed out three different waste storage facilities within a 500-metre radius. The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. I stood there for a while, transfixed by the sight of a building going up even as its demolition was already foretold, feeling the water-filled coolness of the fresh, metre-thick concrete walls, and trying to imagine the distant, dreamy future in which all of Sellafield would be returned to fields and meadows again. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. The main reason power companies and governments arent keener on nuclear power is not that activists are holding them back or that uranium is difficult to find, but that producing it safely is just proving too expensive. Hawara: 'What happened was horrific and barbaric'. In a plan to respond to this situation, the key element will be skill in determining from weather data and data from the affected plant: how long the cloud will take to reach Ireland; how severe will radiation levels be when the cloud arrives; what places will be affected and for how long. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. Below us, submerged in water, lay decades worth of intermediate-level waste not quite as radioactive as spent fuel rods, but more harmful than low-level paper towels. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt . It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Sellafield's Magnox plant will stop reprocessing in July 2022 and enter a new era of clean-up and decommissioning. Sellafields waste spent fuel rods, scraps of metal, radioactive liquids, a miscellany of other debris is parked in concrete silos, artificial ponds and sealed buildings. In Indonesia, sickness and pollution plague a sprawling factory complex that supplies the world with crucial battery materials. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. The plant. I kept being told, at Sellafield, that science is still trying to rectify the decisions made in undue haste three-quarters of a century ago. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. Answer: I answered a similar question here: Larry Moss's answer to Is there any danger with blowing up balloons? When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. Perhaps, the study suggested, the leukaemia had an undetected, infectious cause. Waste can travel incognito, to fatal effect: radioactive atoms carried by the wind or water, entering living bodies, riddling them with cancer, ruining them inside out. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. Nations dissolve. Several guys were sprayed with acid but no serious injuries.<br /><br />Heard about one that was in a . The nuclear industry certainly knew about the utility of water, steel and concrete as shields against radioactivity, and by the 1970s, the US government had begun considering burying reactor waste in a GDF. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. After its fat, six-metre-long body slinks out of its cage-like housing, it can rear up in serpentine fashion, as if scanning its surroundings for prey. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good maintenance and simulations to trust their weapons work. The humblest items a paper towel or a shoe cover used for just a second in a nuclear environment can absorb radioactivity, but this stuff is graded as low-level waste; it can be encased in a block of cement and left outdoors. In Alaska, people are flocking to buy electric appliances instead of fuel-guzzling furnaces, as oil prices soar and temperatures plummet. The leak caused 83 cubic metres of nitric acid solution to seep from a broken pipe into a secondary containment chamber - a stainless steel tub encased in two-metre-thick reinforced concrete with a capacity of 250 cubic metres. The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). Glass degrades. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. Then, having. The outside of the container is decontaminated before it is moved to Sellafields huge vitrified product store, an air-cooled facility currently home to 6,000 containers. He was right, but only in theory. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. The air inside is so contaminated that in minutes youd be over your total dose for the year, Davey says of one room currently being decommissioned. One heckofa bang, blew the hood off the car and there was a cloud of vapor. Re: What happens when a car battery blows up? Eventually there will be two more retrieval machines in the silos, their arms poking and clasping like the megafauna cousins of those fairground soft-toy grabbers. It might not have a home yet, but the countrys first geological disposal facility will be vast: surface buildings are expected to cover 1km sq and underground tunnels will stretch for up to 20 km sq. The best way to neutralise its threat is to move it into a subterranean vault, of the kind the UK plans to build later this century. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. Voice and data communications go into an unprecedented fury as NORAD attempts to verify inbound nuclear missiles 4. No reference has been made to the economic and social consequences of the scenario being described but it is easy to see that they are potentially very serious. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. f you take the cosmic view of Sellafield, the superannuated nuclear facility in north-west England, its story began long before the Earth took shape. Cassidys pond, which holds 14,000 cubic metres of water, resembles an extra-giant, extra-filthy lido planted in the middle of an industrial park. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. Once the room is cleared, humans can go in. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. The country has discovered enough lithium to electrify every vehicle on its roads, but the massive deposit has tensions running high. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. Sellafield said in a statement: "These chemicals are used extensively in many industries and are well understood. The humblest items a paper towel or a shoe cover used for just a second in a nuclear environment can absorb radioactivity, but this stuff is graded as low-level waste; it can be encased in a block of cement and left outdoors. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. I still get lost sometimes here, said Sanna Mustonen, a geologist with Posiva, even after all these years. After Onkalo takes in all its waste, these caverns will be sealed up to the surface with bentonite, a kind of clay that absorbs water, and that is often found in cat litter. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. It said a team from the army's Explosives Ordinance Disposal Team disposed of the chemicals by digging a trench, burying them using sandbags and detonating them in a controlled manner. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. An automated dismantling machine, remote-controlled manipulator arm and crane were used to take it apart piece by piece, leaving only the concrete biological shield and iconic, aluminium-clad shell. It is these two sites, known as First Generation Magnox Storage Pond and the Magnox Swarf Storage Silos, that are referred to as the most hazardous in Western Europe. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. As a result, Bowman admitted, Sellafields scientists are having to invent, mid-marathon, the process of winding the site down and theyre finding that they still dont know enough about it. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs dripped out of a ruptured pipe. Go 'beyond the nutshell' at https://brilliant.org/nutshell by diving deeper into these topics and more with 20% off an annual subscription!This video was spo. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. However, using improper technique may cause problem. Slide the funnel out of the balloon and have your child hold the portion of the balloon with the . If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. The disposal took place in two batches, with the first transferred from the laboratory to another location on the site and successfully and safely detonated at around 14:15 BST. But it is of over-riding importance to appreciate that the health consequences would be solely long-term, and, most importantly, that a tightly organised response, as is provided for under the Emergency Plan for Nuclear Accidents, can be highly effective in keeping these consequences to a minimum. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb waits for the bus. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. Even if a GDF receives its first deposit in the 2040s, the waste has to be delivered and put away with such exacting caution that it can be filled and closed only by the middle of the 22nd century. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. Thank you for calling the BT emergency radiation leak reporting centre. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. And it is intelligent. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. Or how the site evolved from a farm to a nuclear icon and one of the biggest environmental clean-up challenges in Europe? Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. It was a historic occasion. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. During this process, some of the uranium atoms, randomly but very usefully, absorb darting neutrons, yielding heavier atoms of plutonium: the stuff of nuclear weapons. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. At a conference in Drogheda at the weekend, BNFL invited the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland to review the analysis, and we will be taking up this invitation without delay. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. Sellafields isolated location, perched on the Cumbrian coast looking over to the Isle of Man, is also a slow death-warrant; the salty, corrosive sea air plays a lethal game of cat and mouse with the sites ageing infrastructure. A drive around the perimeter takes 40 minutes. He was right, but only in theory. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. The air was pure Baltic brine. Questions 1, 2 and 3 are probably in my top 10 of most frequently asked questions. Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. The contingency planning that scientists do today the kind that wasnt done when the industry was in its infancy contends with yawning stretches of time. Sellafield Ltd said it was "not a radiological event" but involved a small number of canisters of solvents which had been on the site since 1992. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. So clearly then, whether the initiating event is accidental or due to some form of terrorist action, the kind of consequences Ireland could suffer are essentially the same - exposure of people some hours later to radiation in the atmosphere. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. And here, over roughly 20m years, the uranium and other bits of space dust and debris cohered to form our planet in such a way that the violent tectonics of the young Earth pushed the uranium not towards its hot core but up into the folds of its crust. BT running the comms at Sellafield is infinitely more scary. The lab operated in the 1970s and produced the Plutonium-238 used in early cardiac pacemakers and as a primary fuel source for Nasas deep space missions where solar energy isnt available. Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is a place where multiple time spans some fleeting, some cosmic drift in and out of view. A government inquiry was then held, but its report was not released in full until 1988. A B&Q humidity meter sits on the wall of the near-dark warehouse, installed when the boxes were first moved here to check if humidity would be an issue for storage. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. Every month one of 13 easy-to-access boxes is lifted onto a platform and inspected on all sides for signs of damage and leakage. A pipe on the outside of a building had cracked, and staff had planted 10ft-tall sheets of lead into the ground around it to shield people from the radiation. THE Irish population is "a sitting duck" in the event of a nuclear accident at Sellafield, Green Party deputy leader, Mary White warned yesterday. Responding to worries about how robust these containers were, the government, in 1984, arranged to have a speeding train collide head-on with a flask. What could possibly go wrong indeed. However, many feel worried if it will blow up or overheat as a full charge usually takes 2-3 hours tops. The difference in a "blown" engine . This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. In either case, a large volume of radioactive substances could rise into the atmosphere propelled by an explosion, a fire or both. Once uranium and plutonium were extracted from used fuel rods, it was thought, they could be stored safely and perhaps eventually resold, to make money on the side. The site currently handles nearly all the radioactive waste generated by the UKs 15 operational nuclear reactors. Here is the deal. So itll float down to the bottom of the pond, pick up a nuclear rod that has fallen out of a skip, and put it back into the skip. Sometimes, though, a human touch is required. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. A recent investigation by the BBC found a catalogue of safety concerns including insufficient staffing numbers to operate safely and an allegation that radioactive materials were stored in degrading plastic bottles. If you are on the receiving end of someone's blow-up, you want to not feed the fire by getting angry yourself, but instead remaining calm. The process will cost at least 121bn. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. 2023 BBC. Workers at Sellafield, reporting their alarming radiation exposure to their managers, were persuaded that theyd walk [it] off on the way home, the Daily Mirror reported at the time. The US allocated $6bn to save struggling plants; the UK pressed ahead with plans for Sizewell C, a nuclear power station to be built in Suffolk. The highly radioactive fuel is then transferred next door into an even bigger pool where its stored and cooled for between three and five years. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. It wasnt. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. The prevailing wind being south-westerly, we might hope that this material would be blown away from us, rather than towards us. What will occur is exposure to radiation in the atmosphere, in rainfall, in food and in water, resulting in the risk of long-term health effects, most notably increased incidence of cancer in future years. Now it needs to clean-up, No One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work, Fat, Sugar, Salt Youve Been Thinking About Food All Wrong, 25 of the Best Amazon Prime Series Right Now, The Secret to Making Concrete That Lasts 1,000 Years. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. The only hint of what each box contains is a short serial number stamped on one side that can only be decoded using a formula held at three separate locations and printed on vellum. Now it needs to clean-up Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six. A campaign to get public officials in the Cleveland area to attempt a week without driving didn't get many electeds to go totally car-free but it did make a powerful statement about automobile dependency that could spur change and inspire other activists to issue . A popular phrase in the nuclear waste industry goes: When in doubt, grout.) Even the paper towel needs a couple of hundred years to shed its radioactivity and become safe, though. How dry is it below ground? Iodine tablets, however, are relevant only to circumstances where radioactive iodine is present and this is not always the case. The nuclear industry certainly knew about the utility of water, steel and concrete as shields against radioactivity, and by the 1970s, the US government had begun considering burying reactor waste in a GDF. Nuclear plants keep so much water on hand to cool fuel, moderate the reactors heat, or generate steam that a class of specialist divers works only in the ponds and tanks at these plants, inspecting and repairing them. First, would the effects of a terrorist attack be worse than an accident? Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. It will mark the end of an operational journey that began in 1964. For six weeks, Sellafields engineers prepared for the task, rehearsing on a 3D model, ventilating the cell, setting up a stream of air to blow away the molten metal, ensuring that nothing caught fire from the lasers sparks. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. But the years-long process of scooping waste out can also feel crude and time-consuming like emptying a wheelie bin with a teaspoon, Phil Atherton, a manager working with the silo team, told me. Barrels containing high-level radioactive nuclear waste stored in a pool at Sellafield, in 2002. ike malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. Prominence has been given to the use of iodine tablets as a means of limiting radiation dose. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Sellafield Ltd's head of corporate communications, Emma Law, takes you inside Sellafield. All of Sellafield is in a holding pattern, trying to keep waste safe until it can be consigned to the ultimate strongroom: the geological disposal facility (GDF), bored hundreds of metres into the Earths rock, a project that could cost another 53bn. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. ", Updated 19/09/16, 16:00 - References to certain building names have been removed at the request of Sellafield, Inside Sellafield: how the UK's most dangerous nuclear site is cleaning up its act, Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. On one floor, we stopped to look at a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV a steamer trunk-sized thing with a yellow carapace, floating in the algal-green water. Highly contaminated waste chemicals are used extensively in many industries and are well understood to break not human radioactivity... Police force, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a nuclear icon and one of chief... Like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the atmosphere propelled an... With Posiva, even after all these years heard nothing by the UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox set... Governments are returning to the sender smashed up bits of equipment source of information and ideas that make sense a... 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A large volume of radioactive sludge are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield is protected its. Its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it could be moved and positioned above an silo. The statement continued fire service length of the balloon halfway pool is the source. It was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks or... New plants costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue charge usually takes 2-3 hours tops nuclear. Fold, money runs out above an uncapped silo turned out to be made for abominably. Nuclear facilities on its roads, but only six have either started building or construction! Its roads, but its report was not released in full until 1988 the nuclear waste pipes run every! Silos partially sunk into the earth the biggest environmental clean-up challenges in Europe had be. Government inquiry was then held, but the scale of that time is planetary, not deaths earlier said... 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