The threat, as stated above, is of airborne radioactivity and, even in the worst case, there will be a period of hours before it arrives. Atomic weapons are highly complex, surprisingly sensitive, and often pretty old. f you take the cosmic view of Sellafield, the superannuated nuclear facility in north-west England, its story began long before the Earth took shape. 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. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. 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. One heckofa bang, blew the hood off the car and there was a cloud of vapor. 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. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. A healthy person ingests around 1.5 litres of nasal secretions a day, so sniffing and swallowing isn't harmful. Now it needs to clean-up Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six. We ducked through half-constructed corridors and emerged into the main, as-yet-roofless hall. The ceiling for now is 53bn. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste. A second controlled explosion was then carried out at the same location shortly before 16:00 BST. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. This was the Windscale fire which occurred when uranium metal fuel ignited inside Windscale Pile no.1. And it is intelligent. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. What could possibly go wrong indeed. 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. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. 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 involving these plants. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. The hot, compressed oxygen explodes in a runaway . Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. Sellafield was the site in 1957 of one of the world's worst nuclear incidents. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. 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. 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. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. 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. Please stay on the line. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. 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. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. Spent fuel rods and radioactive pieces of metal rest in skips, which in turn are submerged in open, rectangular ponds, where water cools them and absorbs their radiation. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) In the water, the skips full of used fuel rods were sometimes stacked three deep, and when one was placed in or pulled out, rods tended to tumble out on to the floor of the pond. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb waits for the bus. Heat Pumps Sell Like Hotcakes on America's Oil-Rich Frontier. 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. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. 2023 BBC. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. 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. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. As the nation's priorities shifted,. #7. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. Rebel skirmishes, global politics, and a caustic atmosphere are just some of the obstacles in Christopher Horsleys mission to capture life-saving visuals. Multiple simultaneous launches are detected 2. Nations dissolve. In either case, a large volume of radioactive substances could rise into the atmosphere propelled by an explosion, a fire or both. 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. Answer: I answered a similar question here: Larry Moss's answer to Is there any danger with blowing up balloons? 45,907. Sellafields waste spent fuel rods, scraps of metal, radioactive liquids, a miscellany of other debris is parked in concrete silos, artificial ponds and sealed buildings. We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle, Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) Since September 11th, public concern in Ireland about Sellafield has taken on the added dimension of fear of a terrorist attack on 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. 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. 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. Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. Generated revenues of 9bn, says site operator Sellafield Ltd. Ended operation November 2018. Thank you for calling the BT emergency radiation leak reporting centre. 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. 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. 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. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. The document ran to 17,000 pages. Sellafield Ltd's head of corporate communications, Emma Law, takes you inside Sellafield. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. Now it needs to clean-up, No One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work, Fat, Sugar, Salt Youve Been Thinking About Food All Wrong, 25 of the Best Amazon Prime Series Right Now, The Secret to Making Concrete That Lasts 1,000 Years. No possible version of the future can be discounted. "It is urgent that we clean up these ponds [but] it will be decades before they are . 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. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. We must assume, however, that we might not be so lucky. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. Not necessarily. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. 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. Re: What happens when a car battery blows up? 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. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good maintenance and simulations to trust their weapons work. 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. 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. 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. May 11, 2005. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. 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. 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. Hinkley Point C, the first new nuclear plant in a generation, is being built in Somerset, but its cost has bloated to more than 25bn. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. But the boxes, for now, are safe. Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. Fill a water bottle one-third full of vinegar. 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. Put a funnel in the neck of a balloon, and hold onto the balloon neck and funnel. ", 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. Any pathogens within the phlegm will be easily neutralised by . Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. The dissolved fuel, known as liquor, comprises 96 per cent uranium, one per cent plutonium and three per cent high-level waste containing every element in the periodic table. Several guys were sprayed with acid but no serious injuries.<br /><br />Heard about one that was in a . 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. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. In a van, we went down a steep, dark ramp for a quarter of an hour until we reached Onkalos lowest level, and here I caught the acrid odour of a closed space in which heavy machinery has run for a long time. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. Biologists are working to quickly grow hardier specimens that can be propagated and transplanted by robotic arms. 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. 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. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. Sellafield said in a statement: "These chemicals are used extensively in many industries and are well understood. Questions 1, 2 and 3 are probably in my top 10 of most frequently asked questions. The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). The prevailing wind being south-westerly, we might hope that this material would be blown away from us, rather than towards us. Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. The video is spectacular. 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. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. 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. 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. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. 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. 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. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield Remote submarines have explored and begun cleaning up old storage ponds. Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. 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. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. Read about our approach to external linking. 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. It has its own railway station and, until September 11, 2001, its visitor centre was a major tourist attraction visited by an average of 1,000 people per day. 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. And the waste keeps piling up. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. Once a vital part of the nation's. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. In Indonesia, sickness and pollution plague a sprawling factory complex that supplies the world with crucial battery materials. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. 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. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt . She meets aunts and cousins on her shifts all the time. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) It will mark the end of an operational journey that began in 1964. 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. The country has discovered enough lithium to electrify every vehicle on its roads, but the massive deposit has tensions running high. fully-fuelled aircraft could directly impact on the highest-risk plants at the site without resulting in the release to the atmosphere of a very large quantity of radioactivity. Other remote machines are being used to take cameras deep inside decaying. We power-walked past nonetheless. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. 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. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. 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. Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. At least you can reason with AI. Much of the facility is now being decommissioned. 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. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. But. 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. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. All radioactivity is a search for stability. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. Read about our approach to external linking. Everybodys thinking: What do we do? Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. 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. The Baking Soda Balloon Blow-Up Experiment. 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 laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. When records couldnt be found, Sellafield staff conducted interviews with former employees. It was a historic occasion. 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. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. What would happen if the entire world launched nukes at the US at the same time? "Because this is happening on the Sellafield site we exercise extreme caution and leave nothing to chance.". Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. 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. 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. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea. The disposal took place in two batches, with the first transferred from the laboratory to another location on the site and successfully and safely detonated at around 14:15 BST. 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. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. Two Cumbrian enviromental protestors fined for blocking London road, Campaign launched for stroke and coronary care services at hospital, Grants fund learning and land management at Cumbrian farm, Starbucks to open in Ulverston this Friday, Learning hub opens in Ulverston for children with special needs, Belgian Beer Festival to take place in Kendal, Human error to blame for deadly train crash, says Greek PM, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. 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. Bomb disposal experts were called to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant after a routine audit of chemicals stored in a laboratory. 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. 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. That forecast has aged poorly. It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. 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. 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. In 1947, the Sellafield site opened with a single mission - the production of plutonium, a radioactive chemical element for use in Britain's nuclear deterrent. 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. Have you ever wondered what happens behind Sellafield's security fences? BT running the comms at Sellafield is infinitely more scary. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. 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 site currently handles nearly all the radioactive waste generated by the UKs 15 operational nuclear reactors. 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. 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. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. 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