The Commons defence committee in its report said that "attention has particularly focused on perceived vulnerability of nuclear installations". Now its operators are in a race against time to make the most dangerous areas safe. Any time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle, Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. The dissolved fuel, known as liquor, comprises 96 per cent uranium, one per cent plutonium and three per cent high-level waste containing every element in the periodic table. Things could get much worse. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. A 10-storey building called B204 had been Sellafields first reprocessing facility, but in 1973, a rogue chemical reaction filled the premises with radioactive gas. The air was pure Baltic brine. 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. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. Video, 00:01:03, Up Next. 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. 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. 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. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. "It was a great job. Well, from the interviews with Raaz, Reed and former Sellafield boss Barry Snelson, there isn't any. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. What happens at Sellafield in the UK? - KOOLOADER.COM The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. The source of the leak, as America soon learned, was traced to a tiny rubber part called an O-ring, which formed the seal . Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. 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. 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. 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. And so they must be maintained and kept standing. 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. Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. It was a historic occasion. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. Sellafield chemical find prompts bomb squad visit - BBC News However, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday that a "quick response" procedure was in place to cover the whole of the country in the event of a hijack attack. What Caused the Challenger Disaster? - History Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. 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. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. The place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. 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. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. 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. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. 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. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. Don't get me wrong. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. 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. Once the room is cleared, humans can go in. It wasnt. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. Both buildings, for the most part, remain standing to this day. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. This cycle, from acid to powder, lasted up to 36 hours, Dixon said and it hadnt improved a jot in efficiency in the years shed been there. In the water, the skips full of used fuel rods were sometimes stacked three deep, and when one was placed in or pulled out, rods tended to tumble out on to the floor of the pond. It was useless with people, too. It is now home to a one-tonne BROKK-90 demolition machine which smashes up sections of the lab and loads them into plastic buckets on a conveyer belt. Jeremy Hunt wants nuclear power classed as sustainable: is it? It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. "You kept quiet. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. And the waste keeps piling up. And thats the least zany thing about it. The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. 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. 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. But, the book suggests, its sheer physical isolation may have been responsible for some of the deep fears that people have of nuclear power. 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 . Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. What would happen if a Black Hole Exploded? | Page 1 | Naked Science Forum The solution, for now, is vitrification. 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. 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. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. 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 1947, the Sellafield site opened with a single mission - the production of plutonium, a radioactive chemical element for use in Britain's nuclear deterrent. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. "What aroused my anxieties was within 12 or 18 months I conducted the funerals of thee children who died of leukaemia. The bunker mentality has eased and the safety systems are better. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. The process of getting suited up and into the room takes so much time that workers only spend around 90 minutes a day in contaminated areas. Once in the facility, the lid bolts on the flasks are removed and the fuel is lowered into a small pool of water and taken out of the flask. 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. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. Is Sellafield worse than Chernobyl? Scientists believe lasting symptoms following a coronavirus infection is not a single disorder. A 2,000-mile high pillar of cloud has formed on Saturn and scientists believe the planet may explode in the near future. 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. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. Why Do Few Missiles Explode Before Hitting The Target? - Science ABC Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. But making safe what is left behind is an almost unimaginably expensive and complex task that requires us to think not on a human timescale, but a planetary one. Near-Earth supernova - Wikipedia Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. 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. Dr Thompson, who was based in the UK for 10 years and gave evidence at the 1977 Windscale inquiry into reprocessing at Sellafield, and the Sizewell inquiry, is an expert on the potential fallout from a nuclear accident or deliberate act of terrorism. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. Everyone in West Cumbria has a relationship with Sellafield. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. It recklessly dumped contaminated water out to sea and filled old mines with radioactive waste. How radioactive waste ended up spending decades in open-air ponds is a story typical of Sellafields troubled past. The problem is that the plant which is supposed to turn this liquid waste into more managable and less dangerous glass blocks has never worked properly and a backlog cannot be cleared for another 15 years. 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. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. I left in 1990 a free man but plutonium-exposed. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. Of course the sun is only about 4.6 billion years old, half way through its lifespan of about 10 bil. Video, 00:01:13Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. 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. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. 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.. No possible version of the future can be discounted. 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. 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. if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. But how did Sellafield become Europe's nuclear dustbin and the target of so much hostility to nuclear power? The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. 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. 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. 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. 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. Amid tight security at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, is a store holding most of Britain's stockpile of plutonium. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. 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. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. You see, an explosion usually inflicts damage in two major ways . "I used to get very cross with their housing policy. Accidents had to be modelled. 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. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. 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. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. What is radioactive waste management? Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. 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. 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. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. Who Is The CEO Of Sellafield? - Caniry So it was like: OK, thats it? New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. Six decades after Britain's worst nuclear accident, an oral history of Sellafield reveals what it felt like to live near the plant, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Video, 00:01:03Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Up Next. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. 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. The House of Mouse has plenty of streaming options for the whole family. 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. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. 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. It thought nothing of trying to block Wastwater lake to get more water or trying to mine the national park for a waste dump. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. Earlier this year WIRED was given rare access to Sellafield, a sprawling collection of buildings dating back to the first atom-splitting flash of the nuclear age. The reprocessing plants end was always coming. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. We power-walked past nonetheless. 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. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. Security researchers are jailbreaking large language models to get around safety rules. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. 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. 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. Video, 00:00:33, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the early years of the nuclear age. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. Video, 00:01:07, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. What happened to Fiddlers Ferry power station? - TimesMojo What would happen if Sellafield exploded? (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. But the pursuit of commercial reprocessing turned Sellafield and a similar French site into de facto waste dumps, the journalist Stephanie Cooke found in her book In Mortal Hands. Overseas reprocessing contracts signed since 1976 require that this vitrified waste is returned to the country of origin, meaning Sellafield now only has responsibility for storing the UKs vitrified waste. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. As the nation's priorities shifted,. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. The waste, a mix of graphite, bricks, tubing and reams of metalwork so-called low and intermediate-level radioactive waste was then loaded into 121 concrete blocks and sealed using a grout mix of concrete and steel. What Could Happen-Radiation? What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. 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. He was right, but only in theory. 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. To take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. "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. But who wants nuclear waste buried in their backyard? The less you know about it the less you can tell anyone else.". Every family has someone who worked there or has somehow benefited from it. 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. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Read about our approach to external linking. 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. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. In March 2015 work began to pump 1,500 cubic metres of radioactive sludge from the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond, enough to fill seven double-decker buses. At 100mph, a part of the locomotive exploded and the train derailed. What If The Sun Exploded? - YouTube 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 took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. So in a couple of thousand years the Earth and the Solar System would be enveloped in hot, highly ionized gas. I was a non-desirable person on site.". Seagulls chatter, the hum of machinery is constant, a pipe zig-zagging across the ground vents steam. Perhaps, the study suggested, the leukaemia had an undetected, infectious cause. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, . 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. Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. Part of the Sellafield site in Cumbria has been evacuated and an explosives disposal team called in after the discovery of dangerous chemicals. 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. What If the Sun Exploded Tomorrow? - YouTube Those neutrons generate more neutrons out of uranium atoms, which generate still more neutrons out of other uranium atoms, and so on, the whole process begetting vast quantities of heat that can turn water into steam and drive turbines. 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. This has been corrected. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? 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