Near Sellafield, radioactive iodine found its way into the grass of the meadows where dairy cows grazed, so that samples of milk taken in the weeks after the fire showed 10 times the permissible level. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. All radioactivity is a search for stability. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. The UK is currently home to 112 tonnes of what is the most toxic substance ever created - and most of it is held in a modern grey building to one side of the site. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. Logged. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation.". When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. Things could get much worse. What If Betelgeuse Exploded Right Now? You see, an explosion usually inflicts damage in two major ways . Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. Lets go home, Dixon said. All rights reserved. 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. 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. If an emergency does occur, radioactive airborne contamination may be Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. 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. 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. 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. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. 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. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. Video, 00:00:49, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Damon Lindelofs new Peacock series is about a tech-averse nun on a quest for the Holy Grail. 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. McManus suffered, too. Video, 00:00:33Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. I was a non-desirable person on site.". The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. If the geology is simple, and were disposing of just high- and intermediate-level waste, then were thinking 20bn, said Jonathan Turner, a geologist with Nuclear Waste Services. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. The document ran to 17,000 pages. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. 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. Correction: we mixed up the Sun's lifespan with its age. 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. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. 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. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. Read about our approach to external linking. The fact that much of the workforce was drawn from the declining local iron ore and coal mines may explain the camaraderie of the workers and the vibrant community. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. Video, 00:01:13Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. 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. The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. Seagulls chatter, the hum of machinery is constant, a pipe zig-zagging across the ground vents steam. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. As the nation's priorities shifted,. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. 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. But you know you were scared stiff really. 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. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. Video, 00:01:13, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. Sellafield hasnt suffered an accident of equivalent scale since the 1957 fire, but the niggling fear that some radioactivity is leaking out of the facility in some fashion has never entirely vanished. 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. (modern). Watch. WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. It turned out that if you werent looking to make plutonium nukes to blow up cities, Magnox was a pretty inefficient way to light up homes and power factories. The source of the leak, as America soon learned, was traced to a tiny rubber part called an O-ring, which formed the seal . This is Sellafields great quandary. 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. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. 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. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. 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. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. Sellafield took its present name only in 1981, in part to erase the old name, Windscale, and the associated memories of the fire. Cumbria has long been suggested as a potential site for the UKs first, long-term underground nuclear waste storage facility - a process known as geological disposal. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. This has been corrected. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. 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. 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. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? The bad news from the new management? It feels like the most manmade place in the world. 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. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. "It was a great job. 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. Video, 00:05:44, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. An anonymous whistleblower who used to be a senior manager at Sellafield told the broadcasters Panorama programme that he worried about the safety of the site every day. Glass degrades. 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. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. 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. A report from Steve Healey, the chief fire officer for Cumbria, revealed the affected area covers a 50-kilometre circular zone from an epicentre at Sellafield. 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. What Could Happen-Radiation? The 5million attraction operated for 20 years and will now be demolished this month. Game adaptations after him will have to try harder. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. 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. The 1986b Chernobyl meltdown generated a blast the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs when a reactor exploded and burned. Video, 00:00:19Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. When you asked, 'How many would you expect in a community of 2,000 people?' On April 20, 2005 Sellafield workers found a huge leak at Thorp, which first started in July 2004. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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. 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. 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. "I often think there will have been a Seascale cluster of leukaemia because that's where the fallout from the big chimneys was closest. 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. Meta is finally allowing people to add more links to their Instagram profiles. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. Then it generated electricity for the National Grid, until 2003. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. Scientists believe lasting symptoms following a coronavirus infection is not a single disorder. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. We ducked through half-constructed corridors and emerged into the main, as-yet-roofless hall. Spent fuel rods and radioactive pieces of metal rest in skips, which in turn are submerged in open, rectangular ponds, where water cools them and absorbs their radiation. Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said he believed that documents from both the nuclear industry and the government showed neither had ever attempted a thorough analysis of the threat or the options for reducing it. Video, 00:00:33, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. (modern), Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. The ceiling for now is 53bn. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. Video, 00:01:15, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. In a van, we went down a steep, dark ramp for a quarter of an hour until we reached Onkalos lowest level, and here I caught the acrid odour of a closed space in which heavy machinery has run for a long time. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020.
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