"A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle, Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) Flasks ranging in size from 50 tonnes to 110 tonnes, some measuring three metres high, arrive at Thorp by freight train and are lifted out remotely by a 150-tonne crane. As well as being filled with waste during the early years of the nuclear age, Sellafields ponds were also overwhelmed with spent fuel during the 1974 miners strike. That one there, thats the second most dangerous, says Andrew Cooney, technical manager at Sellafield, nodding in the direction of another innocuous-looking site on the vast complex. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. 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 . 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. Once sufficiently cooled, the spent fuel is moved by canal to Sellafields Head End Shear Cave where it is chopped up, dropped into a basket and dissolved in nitric acid. "He was standing there putting water in and if things had gone wrong with the water it had never been tried before on a reactor fire if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. Damon Lindelofs new Peacock series is about a tech-averse nun on a quest for the Holy Grail. On the other hand, high-level waste the byproduct of reprocessing is so radioactive that its containers will give off heat for thousands of years. But we also know from the interviews that it was largely thanks to the courage of deputy general manager Tom Tuohy that the Lake District is still habitable today. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. For three days, no one living in the area was told about the gravity of the accident, or even advised to stay indoors and shut their windows. Queen Elizabeth II at the opening ceremony of the Windscale nuclear power station, later known as Sellafield, in 1956. ome industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? At first scientists believed that the fog near Saturn was coming from Saturn's moon, Titan, but on closer examination it appears that Saturn is undergoing a cataclysm and it could destroy itself in the next ten months. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. It has its own railway station and, until September 11, 2001, its visitor centre was a major tourist attraction visited by an average of 1,000 people per day. These people have pontificated about bringing the stuff in from outside systems and that would give the kids leukaemia. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. But who wants nuclear waste buried in their backyard? Can Sellafield be bombed? Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. Here's Dick Raaz, the outgoing head of the waste depository: "The good news about radioactive waste is it self-destructs, if you just give it long enough." A drive around the perimeter takes 40 minutes. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. This was lucrative work. At one spot, our trackers went mad. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. Now I look back and think, no, we caused that," says McManus. We power-walked past nonetheless. The 5million attraction operated for 20 years and will now be demolished this month. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. So it was like: OK, thats it? Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. 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. This is Sellafields great quandary. The skips of extricated waste will be compacted to a third of their volume, grouted and moved into another Sellafield warehouse; at some point, they will be sequestered in the ground, in the GDF that is, at present, hypothetical. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. The place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. Still, it has lasted almost the entirety of the atomic age, witnessing both its earliest follies and its continuing confusions. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. 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. As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. But the flask, a few scratches and dents aside, stayed intact. 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. 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. 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. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. 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. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. Video, 00:00:28Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. What is radioactive waste management? Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. 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. 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. The less you know about it the less you can tell anyone else.". British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. Video, 00:05:44, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. We power-walked past nonetheless. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. Fifteen years after the New Mexico site opened, a drum of waste burst open, leaking radiation up an exhaust shaft and then for a kilometre or so above ground. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. "You kept quiet. 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. (modern). You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. "Things did go wrong so you just didn'ttake any notice. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. 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. Accidents had to be modelled. How will the rock bear up if, in the next ice age, tens of thousands of years from today, a kilometre or two of ice forms on the surface? Until then, Bowman and others will bend their ingenuity to a seemingly self-contradictory exercise: dismantling Sellafield while keeping it from falling apart along the way. But the economy of the region is more dependent on nuclear than ever before; the MP, Jamie Reed, is a former press officer for Sellafield and no one dares say anything critical if they want to keep a job. 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. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, lived nearby or whose lives havebeen linked to the vast WestCumbrian nuclear complex, we know more now about how people really reacted. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea. 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. When you asked, 'How many would you expect in a community of 2,000 people?' This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. 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. 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. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. Is Sellafield worse than Chernobyl? 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. He was manoeuvring an ROV fitted with a toilet brush a regular brush, bought at the store, he said, just kind of reinforced with a bit of plastic tube. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Sellafield, formerly a Royal Ordnance Factory, began producing plutonium in 1947. But in the atoms of some elements like uranium or plutonium, protons and neutrons are crammed into their nuclei in ways that make them unsteady make them radioactive. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. Amid tight security at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, is a store holding most of Britain's stockpile of plutonium. Video, 00:00:19Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. I only ever saw a dummy of a spent fuel rod; the real thing would have been a metre long, weighed 10-12kg, and, when it emerged from a reactor, run to temperatures of 2,800C, half as hot as the surface of the sun. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. The area includes as far south as Walney, east as Bowness and north almost to the Scottish border. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. 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. By its own admission, it is home to one of the largest inventories of untreated waste, including 140 tonnes of civil plutonium, the largest stockpile in the world. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Western Europe, reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, splitting it into plutonium, uranium and waste. Within reach, so to speak, of the humans who eventually came along circa 300,000BC, and who mined the uranium beginning in the 1500s, learned about its radioactivity in 1896 and started feeding it into their nuclear reactors 70-odd years ago, making electricity that could be relayed to their houses to run toasters and light up Christmas trees. Here's a look at the technology being used in the clean-up operation. For the next decade, it was central to the UK's nuclear weapons programme, before it was taken over by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in 1954. 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. New clinical trials could more effectively reach solutions. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. 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. Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. These have to be secure and robust but they cant be irretrievably secure and robust, because scientists may yet develop better ways to deal with waste. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. Instead of bumbling, British, gung ho pioneers, Sellafield is now run by corporate PR folk and slick American businessmen. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. It will be finished a century or so from now. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. Seven rare cancers were found in the small Seascale community between 1955 and 1983, yet the authorities "proved" this was due to the natural movement of people. It was a historic occasion. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. Management, profligate with money, was criminally careless with safety and ecology. 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. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. 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. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. How high will the sea rise? So in a couple of thousand years the Earth and the Solar System would be enveloped in hot, highly ionized gas. The missiles with proximity fuses generally detonate when they come within a certain distance of their target. Now it needs to clean-up. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. Material housed here will remain radioactive for 100,000 years. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. 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. . Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. 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. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. and were told, 'Perhaps one in 20 years' and you'd had three in a year that's something to bother about. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. 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.. 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. 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.

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