if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. 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. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. 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. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. During this process, some of the uranium atoms, randomly but very usefully, absorb darting neutrons, yielding heavier atoms of plutonium: the stuff of nuclear weapons. 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. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Other underground vaults have been built to store intermediate waste, but for briefer periods; one that opened in a salt cavern in New Mexico in 1999 will last merely 10,000 years. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. Don't get me wrong. The Commons defence committee in its report said that "attention has particularly focused on perceived vulnerability of nuclear installations". I'm not sure if this would be fatal but it's not good. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. 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. What Could Happen-Radiation? Now it needs to clean-up. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. 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. . 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. It recklessly dumped contaminated water out to sea and filled old mines with radioactive waste. It will be finished a century or so from now. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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. It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. 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. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. On one of my afternoons in Sellafield, I was shown around a half-made building: a 1bn factory that would pack all the purified plutonium into canisters to be sent to a GDF. 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. Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site podcast, Hinkley Point: the dreadful deal behind the worlds most expensive power plant, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. 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. The bunker mentality has eased and the safety systems are better. At 100mph, a part of the locomotive exploded and the train derailed. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. In other areas of Sellafield, the levels of radiation are so extreme that no humans can ever enter. 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. McManus suffered, too. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. The day before I met Dixon, technicians had fed one final batch of spent fuel into acid and that was that, the end of reprocessing. The future is rosy. 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. They told me I had a lung burden and that was an accumulation from the 30-odd years I'd worked at Sellafield. 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. At the moment, Nuclear Waste Services is in discussions with four communities about the potential to host a GDF. Weve got folks here who joined at 18 and have been here more than 40 years, working only in this building, said Lisa Dixon, an operations manager. 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. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. He was right, but only in theory. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. 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. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. There are a few reasons why they detonate before hitting the target: one, an 'air burst' renders more damage over a larger area without actually hitting anything. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the. (modern). So it was like: OK, thats it? Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. and were told, 'Perhaps one in 20 years' and you'd had three in a year that's something to bother about. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. When all else had failed to stop the fire, Tuohy, a chemist, now dead, scaled the reactor building, took a full blast of the radiation and stared into the blaze below. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. 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. But the flask, a few scratches and dents aside, stayed intact. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) It thought nothing of trying to block Wastwater lake to get more water or trying to mine the national park for a waste dump. 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. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. "A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. 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. But the boxes, for now, are safe. We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle, Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) The gravitational force due to the black hole is so strong that not even light could escape, never mind fragments of any kind ofexplosion, even a matter/anti-matter explosion in which all matter is converted into radiation. 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. You see, an explosion usually inflicts damage in two major ways . More than 140 tonnes of plutonium are stored in giant. Can Sellafield be bombed? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. 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. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. When they arrived over the years, during the heyday of reprocessing, the skips were unloaded into pools so haphazardly that Sellafield is now having to build an underwater map of what is where, just to know best how to get it all out. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. The sites reprocessing contracts are due to expire in four years but clean-up may take more than 100 years and cost up to 162 billion. 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. 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. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. It was a historic occasion. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. A government inquiry was then held, but its report was not released in full until 1988. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. But then the pieces were left in the cell. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. This is what will happen when Trump is arrested. This is Sellafields great quandary. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. A super-massive black hole couldn't explode. But, the book suggests, its sheer physical isolation may have been responsible for some of the deep fears that people have of nuclear power. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. And the waste keeps piling up. Video, 00:00:35Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. Most of the atoms in our daily lives the carbon in the wood of a desk, the oxygen in the air, the silicon in window glass have stable nuclei. Security researchers are jailbreaking large language models to get around safety rules. 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. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. He was right, but only in theory. (modern), Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. Sellafield Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. A drive around the perimeter takes 40 minutes. Material housed here will remain radioactive for 100,000 years. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. New clinical trials could more effectively reach solutions. Cassidys pond, which holds 14,000 cubic metres of water, resembles an extra-giant, extra-filthy lido planted in the middle of an industrial park. 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. 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. Instead of bumbling, British, gung ho pioneers, Sellafield is now run by corporate PR folk and slick American businessmen. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. Accidents had to be modelled. 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. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. . 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. The air was pure Baltic brine. I left in 1990 a free man but plutonium-exposed. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. I was a non-desirable person on site.". 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 countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. Amid tight security at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, is a store holding most of Britain's stockpile of plutonium. "It was a great job. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. 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. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. It might not have a home yet, but the countrys first geological disposal facility will be vast: surface buildings are expected to cover 1km sq and underground tunnels will stretch for up to 20 km sq. 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. 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. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. The total amount released from Chernobyl was 27 kilograms, almost 100 times less than the potential release from the facility at Sellafield. 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 waste comes in on rails. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. 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. And that put the frighteners on us because we had small children. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. A 2,000-mile high pillar of cloud has formed on Saturn and scientists believe the planet may explode in the near future. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. No. The nuclear industry certainly knew about the utility of water, steel and concrete as shields against radioactivity, and by the 1970s, the US government had begun considering burying reactor waste in a GDF. The sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in. 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. The ceiling for now is 53bn. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. 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. The source of the leak, as America soon learned, was traced to a tiny rubber part called an O-ring, which formed the seal . It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. But you know you were scared stiff really. 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. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. Video, 00:01:15, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. Things could get much worse. Logged. 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. Read about our approach to external linking. Type II supernova explosions are expected to occur in . How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. One retired worker, who now lives in nearby Seascale, thought there might be a dropped fuel rod in one of the glove boxes a rumour that turned out to be false. Its an existential threat to link-in-bio companies. 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. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. When records couldnt be found, Sellafield staff conducted interviews with former employees. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? 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. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. The only hint of what each box contains is a short serial number stamped on one side that can only be decoded using a formula held at three separate locations and printed on vellum. Now it needs to clean-up Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six. 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. On April 20, 2005 Sellafield workers found a huge leak at Thorp, which first started in July 2004. 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. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. Video, 00:00:28Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. Both buildings, for the most part, remain standing to this day. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Then it is vitrified: mixed with three parts glass beads and a little sugar, until it turns into a hot block of dirty-brown glass. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. Watch. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. In January 2015, the government sacked the private consortium that had been running the Sellafield site since 2008. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. NDA is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and publishes a tax strategy for the NDA Group in accordance . The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. These are our favorite classic flicks, Marvel movies, and Star Wars sagas on the streaming platform. Compared to the longevity of nuclear waste, Sellafield has only been around for roughly the span of a single lunch break within a human life. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. Management, profligate with money, was criminally careless with safety and ecology. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere.
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