Everybodys thinking: What do we do? Crab Supernova Explosion [1080p] Watch on. 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. This is what will happen when Trump is arrested. Sellafields waste spent fuel rods, scraps of metal, radioactive liquids, a miscellany of other debris is parked in concrete silos, artificial ponds and sealed buildings. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. More than 140 tonnes of plutonium are stored in giant. 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. The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation.". What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. NASA . The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) 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. 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. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. 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. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. 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 short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. 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. 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. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. "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. Part of the Sellafield site in Cumbria has been evacuated and an explosives disposal team called in after the discovery of dangerous chemicals. 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. Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea. An emergency could occur following a fire, explosion, seismic event or serious leak in one of the areas handling radioactive materials at the Sellafield Site. 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. 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. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. A terrorist attack on Sellafield could render the north of England uninhabitable and release 100 times the radioactivity produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the House of Commons defence committee was told yesterday. 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. 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. And so they must be maintained and kept standing. So in a couple of thousand years the Earth and the Solar System would be enveloped in hot, highly ionized gas. 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. (modern). For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. So it was like: OK, thats it? 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. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. . WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. She meets aunts and cousins on her shifts all the time. Game adaptations after him will have to try harder. 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. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. 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. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. 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. A popular phrase in the nuclear waste industry goes: When in doubt, grout.) Even the paper towel needs a couple of hundred years to shed its radioactivity and become safe, though. These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. 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 . Here's a look at the technology being used in the clean-up operation. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. 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. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. They told me I had a lung burden and that was an accumulation from the 30-odd years I'd worked at Sellafield. 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. Can Sellafield be bombed? 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. Union leader and ex-Commando Cyril McManus says he thought the fire might mean the workers got a day off; Wally Eldred, the scientist who went on to be head of laboratories at BNFL, says he was told to "carry on as normal"; and chemist Marjorie Higham says she paid no attention. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. Now it needs to clean-up. It marked Sellafields transition from an operational facility to a depot devoted purely to storage and containment. He was right, but only in theory. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. "You kept quiet. Where the waste goes next is controversial. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. But the flask, a few scratches and dents aside, stayed intact. The bunker mentality has eased and the safety systems are better. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. "I often think there will have been a Seascale cluster of leukaemia because that's where the fallout from the big chimneys was closest. After a brief, initial flash, Betelgeuse will brighten tremendously . It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. 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. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. 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. 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. 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 breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. 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. Everyone in West Cumbria has a relationship with Sellafield. Video, 00:01:15Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. The plant has changed. The 1986b Chernobyl meltdown generated a blast the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs when a reactor exploded and burned. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. Sellafield, formerly a Royal Ordnance Factory, began producing plutonium in 1947. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. This was Britain's worst-ever nuclear accident, but no one was evacuated, no iodine pills were distributed, work went on and most people were not even told about thefire. But the years-long process of scooping waste out can also feel crude and time-consuming like emptying a wheelie bin with a teaspoon, Phil Atherton, a manager working with the silo team, told me. 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. The air was pure Baltic brine. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. Sellafield Ltd said in a statement: "During a routine inspection of chemical substances stored on the Sellafield site, a small amount of chemicals (organic peroxide) were identified as requiring . 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. 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. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. Video, 00:00:19Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. ", Updated 19/09/16, 16:00 - References to certain building names have been removed at the request of Sellafield, Inside Sellafield: how the UK's most dangerous nuclear site is cleaning up its act, Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? When you asked, 'How many would you expect in a community of 2,000 people?' An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. The book includes interviews with Sellafield foremen, scientists, managers, farmers, labourers, anti-nuclear activists, the vicar, the MP and bank manager, policemen, physicists, welders and accountants. 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 . Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. 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 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 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. 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. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. The solution, for now, is vitrification. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. The less you know about it the less you can tell anyone else.". All rights reserved. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. Logged. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. 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. The bad news from the new management? Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. We power-walked past nonetheless. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. And here, over roughly 20m years, the uranium and other bits of space dust and debris cohered to form our planet in such a way that the violent tectonics of the young Earth pushed the uranium not towards its hot core but up into the folds of its crust. Video, 00:00:35Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. They dont know how much time theyll need to mop up all the waste, or how long theyll have to store it, or what Sellafield will look like afterwards. The future is rosy. 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 plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. 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. All radioactivity is a search for stability. 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. We power-walked past nonetheless. And that put the frighteners on us because we had small children. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. 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. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. 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. and were told, 'Perhaps one in 20 years' and you'd had three in a year that's something to bother about. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. 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. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. 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. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. A drive around the perimeter takes 40 minutes. 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. Much of the facility is now being decommissioned. 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 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. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. 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. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. 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 process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. They dont know exactly what theyll find in the silos and ponds. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. How dry is it below ground? Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. 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. I left in 1990 a free man but plutonium-exposed. 6 Any time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. Don't get me wrong. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. The waste comes in on rails. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. Watch. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. 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. Amid tight security at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, is a store holding most of Britain's stockpile of plutonium. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? We ran punishment runs past it, danced at Calder girls school, kissed the daughters of the scientists, were jeered at by the workers for wearing shorts and we got shown round it, I am almost certain, by Tom Tuohy, whose son was at school with us. 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. Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. It wasnt. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. 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. 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. 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. The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. 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. 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. Now it needs to clean-up Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. Nations dissolve. "A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. 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. What is radioactive waste management? When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. What Could Happen-Radiation? It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. 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. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Perhaps, the study suggested, the leukaemia had an undetected, infectious cause. 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. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades.
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