The Baking Soda Balloon Blow-Up Experiment. 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. 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. After a failed attempt to ask Mr. Oliver for a business loan, Biff steals Mr. Oliver's fountain pen from his desk. 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. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. Advice, based on knowledge of the radiation levels in a particular area, will be issued on local and national radio as to when it is most important to remain inside, and for how long. Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is a place where multiple time spans some fleeting, some cosmic drift in and out of view. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. We must assume, however, that we might not be so lucky. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. Advertisement. Or how the site evolved from a farm to a nuclear icon and one of the biggest environmental clean-up challenges in Europe? 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. He was manoeuvring an ROV fitted with a toilet brush a regular brush, bought at the store, he said, just kind of reinforced with a bit of plastic tube. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. 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. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. 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. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. 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. 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. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. When the cloud does arrive, there will be no immediate physical ill effects to anybody. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. Since September 11th, public concern in Ireland about Sellafield has taken on the added dimension of fear of a terrorist attack on the plant. At its heart is a giant pond full of radioactive . The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. Glass degrades. 1. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. "It is urgent that we clean up these ponds [but] it will be decades before they are . 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 is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. That would create a mixture of magma, rocks, vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. 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. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. At the moment, Nuclear Waste Services is in discussions with four communities about the potential to host a GDF. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. 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. ", 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. 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 solution, for now, is vitrification. 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. Other remote machines are being used to take cameras deep inside decaying. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. Much of the facility is now being decommissioned. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. 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. It is in keeping this exposure for each individual to a minimum that simple practical precautions will be absolutely vital. To take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. Where the waste goes next is controversial. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. 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. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. 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. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. It said a team from the army's Explosives Ordinance Disposal Team disposed of the chemicals by digging a trench, burying them using sandbags and detonating them in a controlled manner. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. And the waste keeps piling up. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. 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 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. Assuming you're using good technique in blowing up your balloons, the only thing likely to happen is that you'll get better at it. "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. 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. 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. Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. That forecast has aged poorly. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? If new nuclear does go ahead in the UK then the technology will be French, Japanese or American. Question 4 is what I consider the 'ultimate goal + worst-case scenario' an artist could think of. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. We power-walked past nonetheless. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd now claims to have carried out an analysis which shows that such an attack would not necessarily have severe effects on Ireland. 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. 2023 BBC. 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. OEMs have made sure that those batteries are not overcharged even if kept for long. Taking the pessimistic view, that such a release of radioactivity could occur, this article attempts to make a realistic assessment of the damage Ireland might suffer in such an event. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. 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. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. The waste comes in on rails. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. The considerable numbers of thyroid cancers in children in Belarus and Ukraine following the Chernobyl accident are likely to have been due not alone to the lack of iodine tablets but also to the unrestricted consumption of contaminated food in the immediate aftermath of the accident. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. But who wants nuclear waste buried in their backyard? "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. 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. In January 2015, the government sacked the private consortium that had been running the Sellafield site since 2008. 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. Saw one explode from across the street. 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. A loss of fluid is the more common cause of failure and this happens through a slow leak or a sudden one when an old hose breaks or the radiator develops a leak. 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. What will occur is exposure to radiation in the atmosphere, in rainfall, in food and in water, resulting in the risk of long-term health effects, most notably increased incidence of cancer in future years. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. If the Yellowstone supervolcano were to erupt, it would happen like this: Heat rising from deep within the planet's core would begin to melt the molten rock just below the ground's surface. It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. 1. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. In other areas of Sellafield, the levels of radiation are so extreme that no humans can ever enter. As a result, Bowman admitted, Sellafields scientists are having to invent, mid-marathon, the process of winding the site down and theyre finding that they still dont know enough about it. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) The process will cost at least 121bn. Many of us put our phones and laptop charging during the night. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. Not necessarily. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. Your call is important to us. Any time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. About 9,000 people are employed at the Sellafield site The estimated cost of cleaning up the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria has risen by almost 2.5bn in a year, a report has. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. 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. 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. 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. 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. In either case, a large volume of radioactive substances could rise into the atmosphere propelled by an explosion, a fire or both. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. 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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. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. Again, things are thrown out of balance, but this time, when the star collapses, it falls in on a core of volatile oxygen, rather than iron. 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. For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. Launches are confirmed and verified. 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 number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. 1. Iodine tablets, however, are relevant only to circumstances where radioactive iodine is present and this is not always the case. "Because this is happening on the Sellafield site we exercise extreme caution and leave nothing to chance.". 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. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. At one spot, our trackers went mad. Theres no fuel coming in. I dont think its really hit the team just yet.. Once radiation arrives, the national network of radiation monitoring stations, supplemented by mobile monitoring units of the Defence Forces and Civil Defence, will enable movement of the radiation cloud to be tracked and radiation levels in each area to be quantified. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. The statement added: "We have now removed the cordon from around the laboratory, and the site is working as it would be on any other Saturday.". The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. Atomic weapons are highly complex, surprisingly sensitive, and often pretty old. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. 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 outside of the container is decontaminated before it is moved to Sellafields huge vitrified product store, an air-cooled facility currently home to 6,000 containers. 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. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. The Mountain Village in the Path of Indias Electric Dreams. 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 skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. What would happen if the entire world launched nukes at the US at the same time? The plant. 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 breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. However, using improper technique may cause problem. What's he waiting for? The possibility of this situation to occur is very unlikely if you handle . The risk to any individual will be directly related to the degree of exposure. 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. The US allocated $6bn to save struggling plants; the UK pressed ahead with plans for Sizewell C, a nuclear power station to be built in Suffolk. 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. 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. 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. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. 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. Rebel skirmishes, global politics, and a caustic atmosphere are just some of the obstacles in Christopher Horsleys mission to capture life-saving visuals. 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