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. Video, 00:01:15Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. The snake, though, could slither right in through a hole drilled into a cell wall, and right up to a two-metre-high, double-walled steel vat once used to dissolve fuel in acid. An emergency could occur following a fire, explosion, seismic event or serious leak in one of the areas handling radioactive materials at the Sellafield Site. Sellafield Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA. But the boxes, for now, are safe. 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. Its the largest such hoard of plutonium in the world, but it, too, is a kind of waste, simply because nobody wants it for weapons any more, or knows what else to do with it. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. What Atherton really wanted to show off, though, was a new waste retrieval system: a machine as big as a studio apartment, designed from scratch over two decades and built at a cost of 100m. It will be finished a century or so from now. 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. It wasnt. It was useless with people, too. How radioactive waste ended up spending decades in open-air ponds is a story typical of Sellafields troubled past. Video, 00:01:07Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. Dr Thompson's report, sent this week in response to the committee's call for new evidence following a report it published last month, is likely further to alarm the Irish government, which has repeatedly protested about danger from the high level waste tanks at Sellafield. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. Which was just as well, because Id gone to Sellafield not to observe how it lived but to understand how it is preparing for its end. Here's a look at the technology being used in the clean-up operation. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. All rights reserved. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. The 5million attraction operated for 20 years and will now be demolished this month. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. Management, profligate with money, was criminally careless with safety and ecology. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. It was just bonkers," says Alan Postlethwaite, the truculentvicar of Seascale, who was accused of being a crypto-communist for even thinking the plant might be linked to cancers. The Magnox reprocessing area at Sellafield in 1986. aste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. More dangerous still are the 20 tonnes of melted fuel inside a reactor that caught fire in 1957 and has been sealed off and left alone ever since. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. What happens if Sellafield is bombed? But Teller was glossing over the details, namely: the expense of keeping waste safe, the duration over which it has to be maintained, the accidents that could befall it, the fallout of those accidents. Anywhere downwind of Sellafield during the releases would be rendered uninhabitable probably for generations and people caught in the fall-out would have a greatly increased chance of getting . Then, at last, the reprocessing plant will be placed on fire watch, visited periodically to ensure nothing in the building is going up in flames, but otherwise left alone for decades for its radioactivity to dwindle, particle by particle. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. The task of shooting down a hijacked commercial airliner has been assigned to RAF Tornado F3 fighters based at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. It thought nothing of trying to block Wastwater lake to get more water or trying to mine the national park for a waste dump. Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six square kilometre site, Sellafield has its own train station, police force and fire service, Some buildings at Sellafield date back to the late-1950s when the UK was racing to build its first nuclear bomb, Low and intermediate-level radioactive waste is temporarially being stored in 50-tonne concrete blocks, Much of Sellafield's decomissioning work is done by robots to protect humans from deadly levels of radiation, The cavernous Thorp facility reprocesses spent nuclear fuel from the UK and overseas, Cumbria County Council rejected an application. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. The Search for Long Covid Treatments Takes a Promising Turn. 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. This is Sellafields great quandary. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. A true monster of a launch vehicle, it generated over 33 million newtons of thrust at liftoff and carried 2.5 million kilograms of fuel and oxidizer. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? At one spot, our trackers went mad. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. . As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. Those who were working there didn't want to be seen against the thing," says Mary Johnson, now in her 90s, who was bornon the farm that was compulsorily purchased to become the site of Sellafield. It also reprocesses spent fuel from nuclear power plants overseas, mainly in Europe and Japan 50,000 tonnes of fuel has been reprocessed on the site to date. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. Their further degradation is a sure thing. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. In other areas of Sellafield, the levels of radiation are so extreme that no humans can ever enter. WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. 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. But at Sellafield, with all its caches of radioactivity, the thought of catastrophe is so ever-present that you feel your surroundings with a heightened keenness. Dr Thompson said that the buildings designed in the 1950s could not withstand a crash from an airliner. A supernova remnant such as the Crab Nebula is about 11 light-year in diameter (and expanding at 0.5% the speed of light), and that star exploded about 1000 years ago. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. Working 10-hour days, four days a week in air-fed suits, staff are tasked with cleaning every speck of dust and dirt until the room has been fully decontaminated. The document ran to 17,000 pages. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. Mario was too iconic to fail. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. 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. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. 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. Anywhere downwind of Sellafield during the releases would be rendered uninhabitable probably for generationsand people caught in the fall-out would have a greatly increased chance of getting cancer. Everybodys thinking: What do we do? The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. We ducked through half-constructed corridors and emerged into the main, as-yet-roofless hall. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. Within minutes of arriving by train at the tiny, windswept Sellafield train station the photographer I visited the site with was met by armed police. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. Both buildings, for the most part, remain standing to this day. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. The rods arrived at Sellafield by train, stored in cuboid flasks with corrugated sides, each weighing about 50 tonnes and standing 1.5 metres tall. Things could get much worse. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. Conditions inside the Shear Cave are intense: all operations are carried out remotely using robots, with the waste producing 280 sieverts of radiation per hour - more than 60 times the deadly dose. A terrorist attack on Sellafield could render the north of England uninhabitable and release 100 times the radioactivity produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the House of Commons defence committee was told yesterday. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. Glass degrades. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. If you take the cosmic view of Sellafield, the superannuated nuclear facility in north-west England, its story began long before the Earth took shape. We ran punishment runs past it, danced at Calder girls school, kissed the daughters of the scientists, were jeered at by the workers for wearing shorts and we got shown round it, I am almost certain, by Tom Tuohy, whose son was at school with us. (modern), Archive British Path footage of a 1957 news report on radioactive dust escaping from Windscale. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. A near-Earth supernova is an explosion resulting from the death of a star that occurs close enough to the Earth (roughly less than 10 to 300 parsecs (30 to 1000 light-years) away) to have noticeable effects on Earth's biosphere.. An estimated 20 supernova explosions have happened within 300 pc of the Earth over the last 11 million years. (modern), Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. (modern). What If Betelgeuse Exploded Right Now? Of course the sun is only about 4.6 billion years old, half way through its lifespan of about 10 bil. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. The book includes interviews with Sellafield foremen, scientists, managers, farmers, labourers, anti-nuclear activists, the vicar, the MP and bank manager, policemen, physicists, welders and accountants. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. Video, 00:01:03Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Up Next. The missiles with proximity fuses generally detonate when they come within a certain distance of their target. The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation.". It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. Watch. We sweltered even before we put on heavy boots and overalls to visit the reprocessing plant, where, until the previous day, technicians had culled uranium and plutonium out of spent fuel. Since December 2019, Dixon said, Ive only had 16 straight days of running the plant at any one time. Best to close it down to conduct repairs, clean the machines and take them apart. Not far from the silos, I met John Cassidy, who has helped manage one of Sellafields waste storage ponds for more than three decades so long that a colleague called him the Oracle. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the early years of the nuclear age. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. But you know you were scared stiff really. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. And so they must be maintained and kept standing. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. It would have been like Chernobyl there was contamination everywhere, on the golf course, in the milk, in chickens but it was quickly forgotten about," says McManus. The bunker mentality has eased and the safety systems are better. This was Britain's worst-ever nuclear accident, but no one was evacuated, no iodine pills were distributed, work went on and most people were not even told about thefire. 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. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. 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 highly radioactive fuel is then transferred next door into an even bigger pool where its stored and cooled for between three and five years. The reprocessing plants end was always coming. Well, from the interviews with Raaz, Reed and former Sellafield boss Barry Snelson, there isn't any. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. The snakes face is the size and shape of a small dinner plate, with a mouth through which it fires a fierce, purple shaft of light. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. A government inquiry was then held, but its report was not released in full until 1988. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. Dr Thompson said: "A civilian nuclear facility is a potential radiological weapon if the facility contains a large amount of radioactive material that can be released into the environment. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. As the nation's priorities shifted,. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. Gas, fuel rods and radioactive equipment were all left in place, in sealed rooms known as cells, which turned so lethal that humans havent entered them since. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. A terrorist attack on Sellafield could render the north of England uninhabitable and release 100 times the radioactivity produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the House of. All rights reserved. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. From an operational nuclear facility, Sellafield turned into a full-time storage depot but an uncanny, precarious one, filled with toxic nuclear waste that has to be kept contained at any cost. The popular centre, operated by BNFL, was officially opened in 1988 by Prince Philip and went on to become one of West Cumbria's biggest tourist attractions. 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. A super-massive black hole couldn't explode. Instead of bumbling, British, gung ho pioneers, Sellafield is now run by corporate PR folk and slick American businessmen. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? Every family has someone who worked there or has somehow benefited from it. If Onkalo begins operating on schedule, in 2025, it will be the worlds first GDF for spent fuel and high-level reactor waste 6,500 tonnes of the stuff, all from Finnish nuclear stations. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. The air was pure Baltic brine. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. The sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in the stars cores, turning lighter elements like iron into heavier ones like uranium. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. No, I am not anti-nuclear, but my goodness, I think they could have made a better fist of it if they'd tried harder," he says. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? In the waters gloom, cameras offer little help, he said: Youre mostly playing by feel. In the two preceding months, the team had pulled out enough waste to fill four skips. 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. He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. At present the pool can hold 5.5 tonnes of advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) fuel, soon it will be able to hold 7.5 tonnes. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. When records couldnt be found, Sellafield staff conducted interviews with former employees. This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. How dry is it below ground? Security researchers are jailbreaking large language models to get around safety rules. This is what creates a Type II supernova: the core-collapse of an ultra-massive star. Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Western Europe, reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, splitting it into plutonium, uranium and waste. Read about our approach to external linking. Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. The House of Mouse has plenty of streaming options for the whole family. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. Before leaving every building, we ran Geiger counters over ourselves always remembering to scan the tops of our heads and the soles of our feet and these clacked like rattlesnakes. Jeremy Hunt accused of 20bn gamble on nuclear energy and carbon capture, 50m fund will boost UK nuclear fuel projects, ministers say, Hopes for power and purpose from an energy industry in flux, EUs emissions continue to fall despite return to coal, Despite the hype, we shouldnt bank on nuclear fusion to save the world from climate catastrophe, Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean near-limitless energy, Sizewell C confirmed again this time it might be the real deal. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. 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. What If 7.16M subscribers 1.9M views 3 years ago #Betelgeuse At about 950 times bigger than our Sun, Betelgeuse is one of the biggest stars in our Universe.. Other countries also plan to banish their nuclear waste into GDFs. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. With a delicacy not ordinarily required of it, the toilet brush wiped debris and algae off a skip until the digits 9738, painted in black, appeared on the skips flank. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. 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. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. Endoscopes are poked through lead-clad walls before robotic demolition machines and master-slave arms are installed to break up and safely store the waste. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. What emerges is the intimate, honest, sometimes ugly story of how a wartime bomb factory was dumped in one of Britain's most cut-off areas, turned to producing plutonium for the atom bomb, then nuclear electricity and is now a American-led multinational corporation decommissioning the mess that it largely created. Amid tight security at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, is a store holding most of Britain's stockpile of plutonium. This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin.
