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. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. 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. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. The GDF will effectively entomb not just decades of nuclear waste but also the decades-old idea that atomic energy will be both easy and cheap the very idea that drove the creation of Sellafield, where the worlds earliest nuclear aspirations began. Read about our approach to external linking. 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. Dr Thompson said that the buildings designed in the 1950s could not withstand a crash from an airliner. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six square kilometre site, Sellafield has its own train station, police force and fire service, Some buildings at Sellafield date back to the late-1950s when the UK was racing to build its first nuclear bomb, Low and intermediate-level radioactive waste is temporarially being stored in 50-tonne concrete blocks, Much of Sellafield's decomissioning work is done by robots to protect humans from deadly levels of radiation, The cavernous Thorp facility reprocesses spent nuclear fuel from the UK and overseas, Cumbria County Council rejected an application. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. 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. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. 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. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. "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. What happens if Sellafield is bombed? 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. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. Video, 00:01:03Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Up Next. Video, 00:00:19, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. 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. 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. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. 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. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. 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 cancer. At 100mph, a part of the locomotive exploded and the train derailed. 6 Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. Part of the Sellafield site in Cumbria has been evacuated and an explosives disposal team called in after the discovery of dangerous chemicals. Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Western Europe, reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, splitting it into plutonium, uranium and waste. Some buildings are so dangerous that their collapse could be catastrophic, but the funding, expertise or equipment needed to bring them down safely isnt immediately available. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. 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 kept being told, at Sellafield, that science is still trying to rectify the decisions made in undue haste three-quarters of a century ago. If an emergency does occur, radioactive airborne contamination may be "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. 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 highly radioactive fuel is then transferred next door into an even bigger pool where its stored and cooled for between three and five years. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. As well as the threat of a bomb, missile or hijacked plane hitting Sellafield, Dr Thompson raises the possibility of a rogue worker or terrorist infiltrator at Sellafield sabotaging the cooling equipment which prevents the stored waste from boiling and causing a massive radioactive release. But at Sellafield, with all its caches of radioactivity, the thought of catastrophe is so ever-present that you feel your surroundings with a heightened keenness. 2023 BBC. 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. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. 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. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. Any time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. The most vulnerable part of the facilities at Sellafield, dating back to the 1950s, contain giant tanks of high level radioactive waste which has to be constantly cooled and stirred to prevent a chain reaction. (modern). 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. Now I look back and think, no, we caused that," says McManus. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. The two liquids mixed and exploded, destroying the orbiter with it. Video, 00:01:07Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. It would have been like Chernobyl there was contamination everywhere, on the golf course, in the milk, in chickens but it was quickly forgotten about," says McManus. The 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. 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 . The reprocessing plants end was always coming. 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. Responding to worries about how robust these containers were, the government, in 1984, arranged to have a speeding train collide head-on with a flask. Glass degrades. Just like in 1957. 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. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the. It will be finished a century or so from now. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. 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. 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. 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 flask, a few scratches and dents aside, stayed intact. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. "Things did go wrong so you just didn'ttake any notice. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. The bunker mentality has eased and the safety systems are better. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. So in a couple of thousand years the Earth and the Solar System would be enveloped in hot, highly ionized gas. 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 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.. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. What is radioactive waste management? Video, 00:00:32One-minute World News, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. But then the pieces were left in the cell. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. 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. The 5million attraction operated for 20 years and will now be demolished this month. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? More than 140 tonnes of plutonium are stored in giant. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. Jeremy Hunt wants nuclear power classed as sustainable: is it? 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. 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. 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. Video, 00:00:49, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. In comparison, consider how different the world looked a mere 7,000 years ago, when a determined pedestrian could set out from the Humber estuary, in northern England, and walk across to the Netherlands and then to Norway. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. 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. We power-walked past nonetheless. 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. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. 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. 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. Video, 00:00:33, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. 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. 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. 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. if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. And that put the frighteners on us because we had small children. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. In January 2015, the government sacked the private consortium that had been running the Sellafield site since 2008. Video, 00:01:15, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. 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 hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. 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. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. 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. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. "What aroused my anxieties was within 12 or 18 months I conducted the funerals of thee children who died of leukaemia. And the waste keeps piling up. How dry is it below ground? These people have pontificated about bringing the stuff in from outside systems and that would give the kids leukaemia. 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. No. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. These are our favorite classic flicks, Marvel movies, and Star Wars sagas on the streaming platform. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. The video is spectacular. It also reprocesses spent fuel from nuclear power plants overseas, mainly in Europe and Japan 50,000 tonnes of fuel has been reprocessed on the site to date. I was a non-desirable person on site.". Well, from the interviews with Raaz, Reed and former Sellafield boss Barry Snelson, there isn't any. New clinical trials could more effectively reach solutions. 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. 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. Theres no fuel coming in. I dont think its really hit the team just yet.. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in 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. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. I remember my dad saying the nuclear scientists thought they were "little gods" and my mum demanding that our medical records include the fact we were at school so close to the reactors. 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 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. Lets go home, Dixon said. Instead of bumbling, British, gung ho pioneers, Sellafield is now run by corporate PR folk and slick American businessmen. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. 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. The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. All rights reserved. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. Video, 00:05:44Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, One-minute World News. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. But who wants nuclear waste buried in their backyard? 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. 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 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. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. "A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. What emerges is the intimate, honest, sometimes ugly story of how a wartime bomb factory was dumped in one of Britain's most cut-off areas, turned to producing plutonium for the atom bomb, then nuclear electricity and is now a American-led multinational corporation decommissioning the mess that it largely created. 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. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. Video, 00:00:33Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. The document ran to 17,000 pages. The process will cost at least 121bn. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. 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. Video, 00:00:35Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. 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. 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. With a delicacy not ordinarily required of it, the toilet brush wiped debris and algae off a skip until the digits 9738, painted in black, appeared on the skips flank. The buckets are then fed through an enclosed hole in the wall to a waiting RAPTOR master-slave robot arm encased in a box made of steel and 12mm reinforced glass. This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. The task of shooting down a hijacked commercial airliner has been assigned to RAF Tornado F3 fighters based at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. 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. Things could get much worse. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. 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. As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. The site currently handles nearly all the radioactive waste generated by the UKs 15 operational nuclear reactors. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. Video, 00:01:13, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. 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. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. How radioactive waste ended up spending decades in open-air ponds is a story typical of Sellafields troubled past. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. Video, 00:01:13Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. As the nation's priorities shifted,. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal.
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