Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. 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. 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. 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. 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. But how did Sellafield become Europe's nuclear dustbin and the target of so much hostility to nuclear power? If the Saturn V exploded, it could do so with the force of a small atomic bomb, the equivalent of half a kiloton, or about 1/26th the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. The solution, for now, is vitrification. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. Read about our approach to external linking. Damon Lindelofs new Peacock series is about a tech-averse nun on a quest for the Holy Grail. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. 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. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. 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. Logged. What is radioactive waste management? Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. 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. We power-walked past nonetheless. 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. Here's Dick Raaz, the outgoing head of the waste depository: "The good news about radioactive waste is it self-destructs, if you just give it long enough." What Would Happen to Earth if Mars Suddenly Exploded The Infographics Show 12.7M subscribers 8.1K 288K views 10 months ago The end of the world could come from another World War, or a natural. It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. 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. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. 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. 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 was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. 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 took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. An automated dismantling machine, remote-controlled manipulator arm and crane were used to take it apart piece by piece, leaving only the concrete biological shield and iconic, aluminium-clad shell. 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. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. 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. 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. Working 10-hour days, four days a week in air-fed suits, staff are tasked with cleaning every speck of dust and dirt until the room has been fully decontaminated. Now it needs to clean-up. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. 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. 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. But some folk could laugh it off. Video, 00:01:07Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. 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. It thought nothing of trying to block Wastwater lake to get more water or trying to mine the national park for a waste dump. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. Accidents had to be modelled. For the next decade, it was central to the UK's nuclear weapons programme, before it was taken over by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in 1954. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. Video, 00:01:03, Up Next. 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. 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. 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. At the moment, Nuclear Waste Services is in discussions with four communities about the potential to host a GDF. 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. At one spot, our trackers went mad. How high will the sea rise? 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 . 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. This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. 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. Dr Thompson, who was based in the UK for 10 years and gave evidence at the 1977 Windscale inquiry into reprocessing at Sellafield, and the Sizewell inquiry, is an expert on the potential fallout from a nuclear accident or deliberate act of terrorism. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. Now its operators are in a race against time to make the most dangerous areas safe. 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. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. Game adaptations after him will have to try harder. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. Video, 00:01:13, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. 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. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. As the nation's priorities shifted,. The ceiling for now is 53bn. 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. Read about our approach to external linking. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Those neutrons generate more neutrons out of uranium atoms, which generate still more neutrons out of other uranium atoms, and so on, the whole process begetting vast quantities of heat that can turn water into steam and drive turbines. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. 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. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. 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. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. 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. The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation.". Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. 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. 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 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. The 1986b Chernobyl meltdown generated a blast the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs when a reactor exploded and burned. 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. 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. I still get lost sometimes here, said Sanna Mustonen, a geologist with Posiva, even after all these years. After Onkalo takes in all its waste, these caverns will be sealed up to the surface with bentonite, a kind of clay that absorbs water, and that is often found in cat litter. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? A near-Earth supernova is an explosion resulting from the death of a star that occurs close enough to the Earth (roughly less than 10 to 300 parsecs (30 to 1000 light-years) away) to have noticeable effects on Earth's biosphere.. An estimated 20 supernova explosions have happened within 300 pc of the Earth over the last 11 million years. 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. This has been corrected. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. When all else had failed to stop the fire, Tuohy, a chemist, now dead, scaled the reactor building, took a full blast of the radiation and stared into the blaze below. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. In January 2015, the government sacked the private consortium that had been running the Sellafield site since 2008. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. I was a radiation leper. 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. All rights reserved. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. 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. "I often think there will have been a Seascale cluster of leukaemia because that's where the fallout from the big chimneys was closest. The air inside is so contaminated that in minutes youd be over your total dose for the year, Davey says of one room currently being decommissioned. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. Sellafield Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA. The waste comes in on rails. But, the book suggests, its sheer physical isolation may have been responsible for some of the deep fears that people have of nuclear power. The Commons defence committee in its report said that "attention has particularly focused on perceived vulnerability of nuclear installations". The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. 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. How dry is it below ground? Correction: we mixed up the Sun's lifespan with its age. Part of the Sellafield site in Cumbria has been evacuated and an explosives disposal team called in after the discovery of dangerous chemicals. The sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time.
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