From an operational nuclear facility, Sellafield turned into a full-time storage depot but an uncanny, precarious one, filled with toxic nuclear waste that has to be kept contained at any cost. This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. 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. Sellafield's Magnox plant will stop reprocessing in July 2022 and enter a new era of clean-up and decommissioning. The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. The institute's scrutiny will focus on whether a large. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. 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. Here is the deal. The waste, a mix of graphite, bricks, tubing and reams of metalwork so-called low and intermediate-level radioactive waste was then loaded into 121 concrete blocks and sealed using a grout mix of concrete and steel. This has been corrected. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. The nuclear industry certainly knew about the utility of water, steel and concrete as shields against radioactivity, and by the 1970s, the US government had begun considering burying reactor waste in a GDF. The rods arrived at Sellafield by train, stored in cuboid flasks with corrugated sides, each weighing about 50 tonnes and standing 1.5 metres tall. Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. The difference in a "blown" engine . You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. Not far from the silos, I met John Cassidy, who has helped manage one of Sellafields waste storage ponds for more than three decades so long that a colleague called him the Oracle. 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 understood to be the Government's intention that very shortly iodine tablets will be available to everybody to keep in their home, with reserve supplies also being held in key locations throughout the country. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb waits for the bus. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. 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. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. A B&Q humidity meter sits on the wall of the near-dark warehouse, installed when the boxes were first moved here to check if humidity would be an issue for storage. "That should help us remove more of the radioactivity early on, so that we can get on with the . 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. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. The reprocessing plants end was always coming. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. As the nation's priorities shifted,. 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. The hot, compressed oxygen explodes in a runaway . The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. Eventually, the plant will be taller than Westminster Abbey and as part of the decommissioning process, this structure too will be torn down once it has finished its task, decades from now. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. Since September 11th, public concern in Ireland about Sellafield has taken on the added dimension of fear of a terrorist attack on the plant. WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. 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. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. Go 'beyond the nutshell' at https://brilliant.org/nutshell by diving deeper into these topics and more with 20% off an annual subscription!This video was spo. 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. The Baking Soda Balloon Blow-Up Experiment. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. 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. Taryl and Elk Skins blow up a Krohler 25 hp engine then crack it ope. 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. Tablets containing non-radioactive iodine, taken just before or at an early stage of exposure, are effective in blocking the uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland and thereby greatly reducing the risk of thyroid cancer in subsequent years. 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. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. Saw one explode from across the street. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. THE Irish population is "a sitting duck" in the event of a nuclear accident at Sellafield, Green Party deputy leader, Mary White warned yesterday. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. The possibility of this situation to occur is very unlikely if you handle . 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. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. Sellafield Ltd said it was "not a radiological event" but involved a small number of canisters of solvents which had been on the site since 1992. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. Advertisement. 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. Heat Pumps Sell Like Hotcakes on America's Oil-Rich Frontier. 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. Re: What happens when a car battery blows up? What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. But the pursuit of commercial reprocessing turned Sellafield and a similar French site into de facto waste dumps, the journalist Stephanie Cooke found in her book In Mortal Hands. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. In a plan to respond to this situation, the key element will be skill in determining from weather data and data from the affected plant: how long the cloud will take to reach Ireland; how severe will radiation levels be when the cloud arrives; what places will be affected and for how long. Workers Are Dying in the EV Industrys Tainted City. 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. Iodine tablets, however, are relevant only to circumstances where radioactive iodine is present and this is not always the case. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. 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. 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. 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. Hawara: 'What happened was horrific and barbaric'. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. And so they must be maintained and kept standing. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. Both buildings, for the most part, remain standing to this day. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. 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. 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. But the boxes, for now, are safe. 5. 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. It was on a charger and in the car with the hood up. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. But the first consideration clearly has to be health. 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. 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. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. So it was like: OK, thats it? As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. The waste comes in on rails. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. 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 video is spectacular. Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. 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. 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. Eventually there will be two more retrieval machines in the silos, their arms poking and clasping like the megafauna cousins of those fairground soft-toy grabbers. What would happen if the entire world launched nukes at the US at the same time? And it is intelligent. Theres no fuel coming in. I dont think its really hit the team just yet.. 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. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. This would most immediately affect consumption of fresh milk from cows which had been grazing on contaminated pastures. Any pathogens within the phlegm will be easily neutralised by . In Alaska, people are flocking to buy electric appliances instead of fuel-guzzling furnaces, as oil prices soar and temperatures plummet. The country has discovered enough lithium to electrify every vehicle on its roads, but the massive deposit has tensions running high. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. Overseas reprocessing contracts signed since 1976 require that this vitrified waste is returned to the country of origin, meaning Sellafield now only has responsibility for storing the UKs vitrified waste. Lets go home, Dixon said. It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. This was the Windscale fire which occurred when uranium metal fuel ignited inside Windscale Pile no.1. We ducked through half-constructed corridors and emerged into the main, as-yet-roofless hall. 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. For six weeks, Sellafields engineers prepared for the task, rehearsing on a 3D model, ventilating the cell, setting up a stream of air to blow away the molten metal, ensuring that nothing caught fire from the lasers sparks. The air was pure Baltic brine. There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. Most of the plants at Sellafield, for instance, because of their nature, do not contain radioactive iodine and iodine tablets would, therefore, have no place in the response to a disaster. But. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. 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. 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. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. One moment you're passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. It will be finished a century or so from now. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. Launches are confirmed and verified. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. 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. 1. 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. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) Other remote machines are being used to take cameras deep inside decaying. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. 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. Sellafield has been called the most dangerous place in the UK, the most hazardous place in Europe and the world's riskiest nuclear waste site. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. Standing in the oldest part of the Sellafield site, the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo has stored nuclear waste in its water-filled chambers for the last 60 years. Bomb disposal experts were called to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant after a routine audit of chemicals stored in a laboratory. 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. Prominence has been given to the use of iodine tablets as a means of limiting radiation dose. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. 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. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. Their further degradation is a sure thing. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. Or how the site evolved from a farm to a nuclear icon and one of the biggest environmental clean-up challenges in Europe? At a conference in Drogheda at the weekend, BNFL invited the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland to review the analysis, and we will be taking up this invitation without delay. 45,907. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. Queen Elizabeth II at the opening ceremony of the Windscale nuclear power station, later known as Sellafield, in 1956. ome industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. He was right, but only in theory. 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