Video, 00:01:07, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, . The reprocessing plants end was always coming. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. ", 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. 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. 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. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. 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. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. 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. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? 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 House of Mouse has plenty of streaming options for the whole family. Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. Is Sellafield worse than Chernobyl? NASA . It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. 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. All rights reserved. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. It recklessly dumped contaminated water out to sea and filled old mines with radioactive waste. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. What is radioactive waste management? Their further degradation is a sure thing. Video, 00:01:15, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Western Europe, reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, splitting it into plutonium, uranium and waste. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. Six decades after Britain's worst nuclear accident, an oral history of Sellafield reveals what it felt like to live near the plant, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. It will be finished a century or so from now. 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. 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. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. "A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. Within reach, so to speak, of the humans who eventually came along circa 300,000BC, and who mined the uranium beginning in the 1500s, learned about its radioactivity in 1896 and started feeding it into their nuclear reactors 70-odd years ago, making electricity that could be relayed to their houses to run toasters and light up Christmas trees. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. 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. Video, 00:00:33, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. The sites reprocessing contracts are due to expire in four years but clean-up may take more than 100 years and cost up to 162 billion. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. 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. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. 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. The book includes interviews with Sellafield foremen, scientists, managers, farmers, labourers, anti-nuclear activists, the vicar, the MP and bank manager, policemen, physicists, welders and accountants. However, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday that a "quick response" procedure was in place to cover the whole of the country in the event of a hijack attack. 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 sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. 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. 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. Glass degrades. But then the pieces were left in the cell. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. 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. These are our favorite classic flicks, Marvel movies, and Star Wars sagas on the streaming platform. No. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. To take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. 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. The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. 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. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. Sellafield Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. 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. The snake, though, could slither right in through a hole drilled into a cell wall, and right up to a two-metre-high, double-walled steel vat once used to dissolve fuel in acid. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. This was lucrative work. No, I am not anti-nuclear, but my goodness, I think they could have made a better fist of it if they'd tried harder," he says. At one spot, our trackers went mad. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. 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. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. McManus suffered, too. No possible version of the future can be discounted. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. Now it needs to clean-up Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six. Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. For three days, no one living in the area was told about the gravity of the accident, or even advised to stay indoors and shut their windows. Can you visit Sizewell B? The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. We ran punishment runs past it, danced at Calder girls school, kissed the daughters of the scientists, were jeered at by the workers for wearing shorts and we got shown round it, I am almost certain, by Tom Tuohy, whose son was at school with us. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. Things could get much worse. At first scientists believed that the fog near Saturn was coming from Saturn's moon, Titan, but on closer examination it appears that Saturn is undergoing a cataclysm and it could destroy itself in the next ten months. If an emergency does occur, radioactive airborne contamination may be 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. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. Part of the Sellafield site in Cumbria has been evacuated and an explosives disposal team called in after the discovery of dangerous chemicals. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. The plant has changed. The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Perhaps, the study suggested, the leukaemia had an undetected, infectious cause. 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. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. 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. Mario was too iconic to fail. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. The UK is currently home to 112 tonnes of what is the most toxic substance ever created - and most of it is held in a modern grey building to one side of the site. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Sellafield Ltd said in a statement: "During a routine inspection of chemical substances stored on the Sellafield site, a small amount of chemicals (organic peroxide) were identified as requiring . 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. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. But the flask, a few scratches and dents aside, stayed intact. The process will cost at least 121bn. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. A 2,000-mile high pillar of cloud has formed on Saturn and scientists believe the planet may explode in the near future. 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. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. Video, 00:00:32One-minute World News, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. By its own admission, it is home to one of the largest inventories of untreated waste, including 140 tonnes of civil plutonium, the largest stockpile in the world. But the boxes, for now, are safe. 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. 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 . Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. This has been corrected. 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. The source of the leak, as America soon learned, was traced to a tiny rubber part called an O-ring, which formed the seal . But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. 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. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. A near-Earth supernova is an explosion resulting from the death of a star that occurs close enough to the Earth (roughly less than 10 to 300 parsecs (30 to 1000 light-years) away) to have noticeable effects on Earth's biosphere.. An estimated 20 supernova explosions have happened within 300 pc of the Earth over the last 11 million years. What Atherton really wanted to show off, though, was a new waste retrieval system: a machine as big as a studio apartment, designed from scratch over two decades and built at a cost of 100m. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. That forecast has aged poorly. How dry is it below ground? Just like in 1957. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. 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. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. 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. What happens if Sellafield is bombed? Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. By its own admission, it is home to one of the largest inventories of untreated waste, including 140 tonnes of civil plutonium, the largest stockpile in the world. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. When all else had failed to stop the fire, Tuohy, a chemist, now dead, scaled the reactor building, took a full blast of the radiation and stared into the blaze below. The bad news from the new management? What If Betelgeuse Exploded Right Now? 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. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. The document ran to 17,000 pages. Video, 00:05:44, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. 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. I was a radiation leper. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. And the waste keeps piling up. Once the room is cleared, humans can go in. 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 marked Sellafields transition from an operational facility to a depot devoted purely to storage and containment. The area includes as far south as Walney, east as Bowness and north almost to the Scottish border. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. Sellafield, formerly a Royal Ordnance Factory, began producing plutonium in 1947. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. She meets aunts and cousins on her shifts all the time. 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. 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. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. Its the largest such hoard of plutonium in the world, but it, too, is a kind of waste, simply because nobody wants it for weapons any more, or knows what else to do with it. "Things did go wrong so you just didn'ttake any notice. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. And that put the frighteners on us because we had small children. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. Anywhere downwind of Sellafield during the releases would be rendered uninhabitable probably for generations and people caught in the fall-out would have a greatly increased chance of getting . 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. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. When they arrived over the years, during the heyday of reprocessing, the skips were unloaded into pools so haphazardly that Sellafield is now having to build an underwater map of what is where, just to know best how to get it all out. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. 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.
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