Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. 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. Thank you for calling the BT emergency radiation leak reporting centre. Here is the deal. Read about our approach to external linking. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. 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. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. If Al Queda decide to hit hit sellafield with anything bigger than a Lear jet, it would most likely spell the end of the eastern seaboard of ireland being anything approaching inhabitable for a very long time. The prevailing wind being south-westerly, we might hope that this material would be blown away from us, rather than towards us. Workers at Sellafield, reporting their alarming radiation exposure to their managers, were persuaded that theyd walk [it] off on the way home, the Daily Mirror reported at the time. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb waits for the bus. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. 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. 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 fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). As well as being filled with waste during the early years of the nuclear age, Sellafields ponds were also overwhelmed with spent fuel during the 1974 miners strike. Once radiation arrives, the national network of radiation monitoring stations, supplemented by mobile monitoring units of the Defence Forces and Civil Defence, will enable movement of the radiation cloud to be tracked and radiation levels in each area to be quantified. Once the room is cleared, humans can go in. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Sellafield's Magnox plant will stop reprocessing in July 2022 and enter a new era of clean-up and decommissioning. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. The air was pure Baltic brine. Other remote machines are being used to take cameras deep inside decaying. 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, Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. Laid out over six square kilometres, Sellafield is like a small town, with nearly a thousand buildings, its own roads and even a rail siding all owned by the government, and requiring security clearance to visit. 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 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. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? Sellafield was the site in 1957 of one of the world's worst nuclear incidents. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Radioactive contamination was released into the environment, which it is now estimated caused around 240 cancers in the long term, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal. Both buildings, for the most part, remain standing to this day. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. In Alaska, people are flocking to buy electric appliances instead of fuel-guzzling furnaces, as oil prices soar and temperatures plummet. 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. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. However, there were concerns they could become hazardous if exposed to oxygen. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. He was right, but only in theory. 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. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. These have to be secure and robust but they cant be irretrievably secure and robust, because scientists may yet develop better ways to deal with waste. Questions 1, 2 and 3 are probably in my top 10 of most frequently asked questions. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea. 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. After a failed attempt to ask Mr. Oliver for a business loan, Biff steals Mr. Oliver's fountain pen from his desk. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. Or how the site evolved from a farm to a nuclear icon and one of the biggest environmental clean-up challenges in Europe? It will be finished a century or so from now. 5. It would be idle to pretend that protection of people from the consequences of such an event is an exact science, or to deny that difficult compromises would be necessary between the effectiveness of precautions against radiation and hardships which these precautions themselves might cause. Towards the end of the play, Biff attempts to expose Willy to the reality of . In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. On the other hand, high-level waste the byproduct of reprocessing is so radioactive that its containers will give off heat for thousands of years. In Indonesia, sickness and pollution plague a sprawling factory complex that supplies the world with crucial battery materials. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. 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. 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. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. 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. 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. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. Read about our approach to external linking. 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 highly radioactive fuel is then transferred next door into an even bigger pool where its stored and cooled for between three and five years. Watch this video ad-free on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/real-life-lore-what-happens-if-yellowstone-blows-up-tomorrowPlease Subscribe: http://bit.ly/2dB7. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. 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. 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. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. It is these two sites, known as First Generation Magnox Storage Pond and the Magnox Swarf Storage Silos, that are referred to as the most hazardous in Western Europe. Scientists have uncovered the Roman recipe for self-repairing cementwhich could massively reduce the carbon footprint of the material today. 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. 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. 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. We must assume, however, that we might not be so lucky. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Photo: Twitter. 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. It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. Slide the funnel out of the balloon and have your child hold the portion of the balloon with the . Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. One heckofa bang, blew the hood off the car and there was a cloud of vapor. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. All radioactivity is a search for stability. Sellafield Ltd's head of corporate communications, Emma Law, takes you inside Sellafield. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. "That should help us remove more of the radioactivity early on, so that we can get on with the . It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. BT running the comms at Sellafield is infinitely more scary. It is vital that it be brought home to every member of the public that this would not be the case. 1. Biologists are working to quickly grow hardier specimens that can be propagated and transplanted by robotic arms. The leak caused 83 cubic metres of nitric acid solution to seep from a broken pipe into a secondary containment chamber - a stainless steel tub encased in two-metre-thick reinforced concrete with a capacity of 250 cubic metres. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. 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. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. 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. 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. 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. An area of the site was cordoned off for most of the day, and the canisters disposed of by controlled explosion. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. DeSantis won't say he's running. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. That one there, thats the second most dangerous, says Andrew Cooney, technical manager at Sellafield, nodding in the direction of another innocuous-looking site on the vast complex. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. 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. VideoRecord numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. 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. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. Advice, based on knowledge of the radiation levels in a particular area, will be issued on local and national radio as to when it is most important to remain inside, and for how long. 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. #7. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. Everybodys thinking: What do we do? 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. 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. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. If you take the cosmic view of Sellafield, the superannuated nuclear facility in north-west England, its story began long before the Earth took shape. In other areas of Sellafield, the levels of radiation are so extreme that no humans can ever enter. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. 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. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. At one spot, our trackers went mad. But the boxes, for now, are safe. Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. We power-walked past nonetheless. 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 estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. The possibility of this situation to occur is very unlikely if you handle . The process will cost at least 121bn. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. Video, Record numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story, BBC's Panorama exposed safety concerns at the plant, Prince Andrew offered Frogmore Cottage - reports, Beer and wine sales in Canada fall to all-time low, Bieber cancels remaining Justice world tour dates, Trump lashes out at Murdoch over vote fraud case, Man survives 31 days in jungle by eating worms, Eli Lilly caps monthly insulin costs in US at $35, Ed Sheeran says wife developed tumour in pregnancy, China and Belarus call for peace in Ukraine. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. Since December 2019, Dixon said, Ive only had 16 straight days of running the plant at any one time. Best to close it down to conduct repairs, clean the machines and take them apart. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. 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. 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 huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. 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. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. 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. The risk to any individual will be directly related to the degree of exposure. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. "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. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. Lets go home, Dixon said. 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. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. And the waste keeps piling up. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. Dr Tom O'Flaherty is chief executive of the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland and a member of the Government's Emergency Planning Task Force, Growing chants that all wars come to an end and negotiations must begin feeds Putins hopes the West will crumble, What is the DUP up to now? 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. VideoAt the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece, Covid origin likely China lab incident - FBI chief, Blackpink lead top stars back on the road in Asia, Exploring the rigging claims in Nigeria's elections, 'Wales is in England' gaffe sparks TikToker's trip, Ukraine war casts shadow over India's G20 ambitions, Record numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. Rebel skirmishes, global politics, and a caustic atmosphere are just some of the obstacles in Christopher Horsleys mission to capture life-saving visuals. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. 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. But who wants nuclear waste buried in their backyard? Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. 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. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. 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. 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. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. What's he waiting for? Advertisement. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. About 9,000 people are employed at the Sellafield site The estimated cost of cleaning up the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria has risen by almost 2.5bn in a year, a report has. 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. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. Question 4 is what I consider the 'ultimate goal + worst-case scenario' an artist could think of. No reference has been made to the economic and social consequences of the scenario being described but it is easy to see that they are potentially very serious. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. OEMs have made sure that those batteries are not overcharged even if kept for long. The institute's scrutiny will focus on whether a large. 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. Atomic weapons are highly complex, surprisingly sensitive, and often pretty old. This has been corrected. There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. Assuming you're using good technique in blowing up your balloons, the only thing likely to happen is that you'll get better at it. 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. 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. It makes sure that it's up for prime time when you get up. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. 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. 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. How radioactive waste ended up spending decades in open-air ponds is a story typical of Sellafields troubled past. In an easterly wind, the cloud of radioactive material would reach the east coast of Ireland in a number of hours, depending on the speed of the wind. If you are on the receiving end of someone's blow-up, you want to not feed the fire by getting angry yourself, but instead remaining calm. 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. Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. That would create a mixture of magma, rocks, vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases. It will mark the end of an operational journey that began in 1964. Material housed here will remain radioactive for 100,000 years. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. The speedy implementation of basic protective measures in the first hours and the following few days after the event can greatly reduce the exposure of individuals at risk and, therefore, greatly improve the ultimate health outcome for the population. How high will the sea rise? From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. The UKs plans are at an earlier stage. This is Sellafields great quandary. 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. Still, it has lasted almost the entirety of the atomic age, witnessing both its earliest follies and its continuing confusions. 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