Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. 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. 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. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. How dry is it below ground? Voice and data communications go into an unprecedented fury as NORAD attempts to verify inbound nuclear missiles 4. This is about self-regulation and responsibility. What's he waiting for? 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. At the moment, Nuclear Waste Services is in discussions with four communities about the potential to host a GDF. 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. What would happen if the entire world launched nukes at the US at the same time? The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. A recent investigation by the BBC found a catalogue of safety concerns including insufficient staffing numbers to operate safely and an allegation that radioactive materials were stored in degrading plastic bottles. 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. 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. Their further degradation is a sure thing. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. 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 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. Both buildings, for the most part, remain standing to this day. 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. 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. Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. A healthy person ingests around 1.5 litres of nasal secretions a day, so sniffing and swallowing isn't harmful. What could possibly go wrong indeed. 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. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. But it is of over-riding importance to appreciate that the health consequences would be solely long-term, and, most importantly, that a tightly organised response, as is provided for under the Emergency Plan for Nuclear Accidents, can be highly effective in keeping these consequences to a minimum. 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. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. "Because this is happening on the Sellafield site we exercise extreme caution and leave nothing to chance.". Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. Robots Enter the Race to Save Dying Coral Reefs. Question 4 is what I consider the 'ultimate goal + worst-case scenario' an artist could think of. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. Where the waste goes next is controversial. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. Sellafield's presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. Fill a water bottle one-third full of vinegar. Since September 11th, public concern in Ireland about Sellafield has taken on the added dimension of fear of a terrorist attack on the plant. Answer: I answered a similar question here: Larry Moss's answer to Is there any danger with blowing up balloons? Taryl and Elk Skins blow up a Krohler 25 hp engine then crack it ope. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Here is the deal. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. Accidents had to be modelled. 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 expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. 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. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. "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. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. 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. At least you can reason with AI. 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. And the waste keeps piling up. 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. 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. The document ran to 17,000 pages. How will the rock bear up if, in the next ice age, tens of thousands of years from today, a kilometre or two of ice forms on the surface? So it was like: OK, thats it? If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. 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. 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. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. Saw one explode from across the street. 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. 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. 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. I leased a beat and the song blew up, but some other artist has the exclusive rights. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. 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. 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. The prevailing wind being south-westerly, we might hope that this material would be blown away from us, rather than towards us. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. It was on a charger and in the car with the hood up. "That should help us remove more of the radioactivity early on, so that we can get on with the . The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. 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. 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. 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. 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. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. Still, it has lasted almost the entirety of the atomic age, witnessing both its earliest follies and its continuing confusions. The solution, for now, is vitrification. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. 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. 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. He was right, but only in theory. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. 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. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. 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? Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. 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. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield Remote submarines have explored and begun cleaning up old storage ponds. 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. In Alaska, people are flocking to buy electric appliances instead of fuel-guzzling furnaces, as oil prices soar and temperatures plummet. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. 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. In a factory on the outskirts of Glasgow, aerospace manufacturer Skyrora is building rockets for a space-bound taxi service for satellites. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb waits for the bus. Nations dissolve. The video is spectacular. Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. Sellafield's Magnox plant will stop reprocessing in July 2022 and enter a new era of clean-up and decommissioning. 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. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. 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. The government is paying private companies 1.7bn a year to decommission ageing buildings at Sellafield. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. That forecast has aged poorly. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. The Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom's history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. NORAD shits its collective pants 3. Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste. The possibility of this situation to occur is very unlikely if you handle . 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. Lets go home, Dixon said. Fifteen years after the New Mexico site opened, a drum of waste burst open, leaking radiation up an exhaust shaft and then for a kilometre or so above ground. However, using improper technique may cause problem. More dangerous still are the 20 tonnes of melted fuel inside a reactor that caught fire in 1957 and has been sealed off and left alone ever since. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. 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. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. 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. 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. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. It might not have a home yet, but the countrys first geological disposal facility will be vast: surface buildings are expected to cover 1km sq and underground tunnels will stretch for up to 20 km sq. May 11, 2005. Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. Read about our approach to external linking. As the nation's priorities shifted,. 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