If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. What Could Happen-Radiation? Everyone in West Cumbria has a relationship with Sellafield. Video, 00:00:33, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. Sellafield nuclear site a 'toxic mix of bullying and harassment' 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. We sweltered even before we put on heavy boots and overalls to visit the reprocessing plant, where, until the previous day, technicians had culled uranium and plutonium out of spent fuel. 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 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 process will cost at least 121bn. The document ran to 17,000 pages. New clinical trials could more effectively reach solutions. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. Video, 00:01:03, Up Next. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. 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. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. 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. He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. 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. The main reason power companies and governments arent keener on nuclear power is not that activists are holding them back or that uranium is difficult to find, but that producing it safely is just proving too expensive. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. 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. 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. Then, having driven through a high-security gate, youre surrounded by towering chimneys, pipework, chugging cooling plants, everything dressed in steampunk. Near-Earth supernova - Wikipedia From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. 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. This was lucrative work. Many of the earliest structures here, said Dan Bowman, the head of operations at one of Sellafields two waste storage ponds, werent even built with decommissioning in mind. Video, 00:00:28, Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. 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. 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. 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. It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. The 5million attraction operated for 20 years and will now be demolished this month. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is a place where multiple time spans some fleeting, some cosmic drift in and out of view. So it was like: OK, thats it? After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. Other countries also plan to banish their nuclear waste into GDFs. 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 . Security scares at Sellafield nuclear waste plant raise fears of Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site Sellafield What to do in a radiation emergency booklet - Cumbria The area includes as far south as Walney, east as Bowness and north almost to the Scottish border. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. How radioactive waste ended up spending decades in open-air ponds is a story typical of Sellafields troubled past. The plant has changed. 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. 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. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. 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. It would have . What would happen if Sellafield exploded? The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. Perhaps, the study suggested, the leukaemia had an undetected, infectious cause. He was right, but only in theory. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. After a brief, initial flash, Betelgeuse will brighten tremendously . Sellafield: 'It was all contaminated: milk, chickens, the golf course The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. All rights reserved. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. "Things did go wrong so you just didn'ttake any notice. What happened to Fiddlers Ferry power station? - TimesMojo Terror attack on Sellafield 'would wipe out the north' - The Guardian Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. Depending on the direction of the wind, cities like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Leeds would be well within fallout range, as would be Dublin. 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. 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. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) 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. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. 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. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. 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. 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. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. Seven rare cancers were found in the small Seascale community between 1955 and 1983, yet the authorities "proved" this was due to the natural movement of people. Meta is finally allowing people to add more links to their Instagram profiles. What does the future hold for Sellafield? - Science and Engineering The House of Mouse has plenty of streaming options for the whole family. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. Sellafield nuclear site evacuated and bomb squad called to explosive Sellafield Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. It was a historic occasion. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. Video, 00:00:35Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. 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.. In Sellafield, these nuclear divers will put on radiation-proof wetsuits and tidy up the pond floor, reaching the places where robotic arms cannot go. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? Lets go home, Dixon said. 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. 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. 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. Don't get me wrong. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. If the Saturn V went boom: The effects of a Saturn V - The Space Review That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. Read about our approach to external linking. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. The bad news from the new management? New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. 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. The snakes face is the size and shape of a small dinner plate, with a mouth through which it fires a fierce, purple shaft of light. Video, 00:05:44Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, One-minute World News. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. In other areas of Sellafield, the levels of radiation are so extreme that no humans can ever enter. Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. 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. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. 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. Correction: we mixed up the Sun's lifespan with its age. Everybodys thinking: What do we do? The ceiling for now is 53bn. Damon Lindelofs new Peacock series is about a tech-averse nun on a quest for the Holy Grail. Can you visit Sizewell B? Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. How high will the sea rise? 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. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. 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. It was useless with people, too. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. 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 BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. The Commons defence committee in its report said that "attention has particularly focused on perceived vulnerability of nuclear installations". The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. 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. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? 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. Is Sellafield worse than Chernobyl? When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. 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. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. This has been corrected. 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. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. Structures that will eventually be dismantled piece-by-piece look close to collapse but they cant fall down. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. (modern), Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. A government inquiry was then held, but its report was not released in full until 1988. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. Endoscopes are poked through lead-clad walls before robotic demolition machines and master-slave arms are installed to break up and safely store the waste. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. Now it needs to clean-up. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. "He was standing there putting water in and if things had gone wrong with the water it had never been tried before on a reactor fire if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. No, I am not anti-nuclear, but my goodness, I think they could have made a better fist of it if they'd tried harder," he says. 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. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. 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. 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. 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. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. What Will Happen When Betelgeuse Explodes? - Forbes Even if a GDF receives its first deposit in the 2040s, the waste has to be delivered and put away with such exacting caution that it can be filled and closed only by the middle of the 22nd century. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. Video, 00:05:44, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. What Would Happen to Earth if Mars Suddenly Exploded - YouTube That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. Who Is The CEO Of Sellafield? - Caniry 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. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. We power-walked past nonetheless. Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. It wasnt. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. Well, from the interviews with Raaz, Reed and former Sellafield boss Barry Snelson, there isn't any. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? 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. You see, an explosion usually inflicts damage in two major ways . 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. 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. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. No. This is what will happen when Trump is arrested. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. 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. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. 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. On one floor, we stopped to look at a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV a steamer trunk-sized thing with a yellow carapace, floating in the algal-green water. Video, 00:01:13, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. 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. Then it generated electricity for the National Grid, until 2003. It recklessly dumped contaminated water out to sea and filled old mines with radioactive waste. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. 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. The less you know about it the less you can tell anyone else.". 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. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. 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. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. 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. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. 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. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. Of course the sun is only about 4.6 billion years old, half way through its lifespan of about 10 bil. 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. 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. A 2,000-mile high pillar of cloud has formed on Saturn and scientists believe the planet may explode in the near future. The sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in the stars cores, turning lighter elements like iron into heavier ones like uranium. Read about our approach to external linking. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car.
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