Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. How dry is it below ground? This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. 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. It was just bonkers," says Alan Postlethwaite, the truculentvicar of Seascale, who was accused of being a crypto-communist for even thinking the plant might be linked to cancers. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. Crab Supernova Explosion [1080p] Watch on. It all put me in mind of a man whod made a house of ice in deepest winter but now senses spring around the corner, and must move his furniture out before it all melts and collapses around him. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. ", 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. 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. 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. Some buildings are so dangerous that their collapse could be catastrophic, but the funding, expertise or equipment needed to bring them down safely isnt immediately available. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, lived nearby or whose lives havebeen linked to the vast WestCumbrian nuclear complex, we know more now about how people really reacted. Their further degradation is a sure thing. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. 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. 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. The place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. 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. The less you know about it the less you can tell anyone else.". 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. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. 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. 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. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. Depending on the direction of the wind, cities like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Leeds would be well within fallout range, as would be Dublin. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. "You kept quiet. Still, it has lasted almost the entirety of the atomic age, witnessing both its earliest follies and its continuing confusions. Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. Waste can travel incognito, to fatal effect: radioactive atoms carried by the wind or water, entering living bodies, riddling them with cancer, ruining them inside out. 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. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. "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. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. 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. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. 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. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. He was right, but only in theory. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. Video, 00:00:19Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. 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. 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. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. Mario was too iconic to fail. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. 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. And thats the least zany thing about it. A 2,000-mile high pillar of cloud has formed on Saturn and scientists believe the planet may explode in the near future. 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. The bunker mentality has eased and the safety systems are better. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. Dr Thompson's report, sent this week in response to the committee's call for new evidence following a report it published last month, is likely further to alarm the Irish government, which has repeatedly protested about danger from the high level waste tanks at Sellafield. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. I'm not sure if this would be fatal but it's not good. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. Well, from the interviews with Raaz, Reed and former Sellafield boss Barry Snelson, there isn't any. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. 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. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. 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. 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. 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. 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. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. We power-walked past nonetheless. The lab operated in the 1970s and produced the Plutonium-238 used in early cardiac pacemakers and as a primary fuel source for Nasas deep space missions where solar energy isnt available. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs dripped out of a ruptured pipe. Much of the facility is now being decommissioned. Video, 00:01:07, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. 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. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. Read about our approach to external linking. 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. 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. These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. But who wants nuclear waste buried in their backyard? 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 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. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. The contingency planning that scientists do today the kind that wasnt done when the industry was in its infancy contends with yawning stretches of time. 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. If Onkalo begins operating on schedule, in 2025, it will be the worlds first GDF for spent fuel and high-level reactor waste 6,500 tonnes of the stuff, all from Finnish nuclear stations. 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. The video is spectacular. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. 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. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. 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. 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. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. 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. The bad news from the new management? But the economy of the region is more dependent on nuclear than ever before; the MP, Jamie Reed, is a former press officer for Sellafield and no one dares say anything critical if they want to keep a job. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. 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. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. The plant has changed. The process of getting suited up and into the room takes so much time that workers only spend around 90 minutes a day in contaminated areas. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. Glass degrades. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. Video, 00:00:33Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. The missiles with proximity fuses generally detonate when they come within a certain distance of their target. The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation.". It wasnt. For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. The area includes as far south as Walney, east as Bowness and north almost to the Scottish border. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. I was a radiation leper. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. "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. Logged. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? All rights reserved. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. 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. 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 . "I often think there will have been a Seascale cluster of leukaemia because that's where the fallout from the big chimneys was closest. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. 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. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. Both buildings, for the most part, remain standing to this day. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. This was lucrative work. Here's a look at the technology being used in the clean-up operation. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. Video, 00:00:28Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. Jeremy Hunt accused of 20bn gamble on nuclear energy and carbon capture, 50m fund will boost UK nuclear fuel projects, ministers say, Hopes for power and purpose from an energy industry in flux, EUs emissions continue to fall despite return to coal, Despite the hype, we shouldnt bank on nuclear fusion to save the world from climate catastrophe, Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean near-limitless energy, Sizewell C confirmed again this time it might be the real deal. 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.
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