Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. In a factory on the outskirts of Glasgow, aerospace manufacturer Skyrora is building rockets for a space-bound taxi service for satellites. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. 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. 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. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. 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 even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. The prevailing wind being south-westerly, we might hope that this material would be blown away from us, rather than towards us. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that there is the world of difference between being at, or very close to, the site of a major nuclear disaster and being 100 miles away, as the nearest point in this country is from Sellafield; or even 60 miles away as we are from Wylfa nuclear power station in north Wales, which is the nuclear installation nearest to Ireland. It is in keeping this exposure for each individual to a minimum that simple practical precautions will be absolutely vital. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. 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. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. The risk to any individual will be directly related to the degree of exposure. At the moment, Nuclear Waste Services is in discussions with four communities about the potential to host a GDF. Nations dissolve. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? Put a funnel in the neck of a balloon, and hold onto the balloon neck and funnel. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. 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. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. Sellafield's Magnox plant will stop reprocessing in July 2022 and enter a new era of clean-up and decommissioning. 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. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. 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. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? The ceiling for now is 53bn. Nuclear plants keep so much water on hand to cool fuel, moderate the reactors heat, or generate steam that a class of specialist divers works only in the ponds and tanks at these plants, inspecting and repairing them. 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, Sizewell C nuclear plant confirmed with 700m public stake, Ineos in talks with Rolls-Royce on mini-nuclear power plant technology. 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. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. 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 skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. Taryl and Elk Skins blow up a Krohler 25 hp engine then crack it ope. Then it is vitrified: mixed with three parts glass beads and a little sugar, until it turns into a hot block of dirty-brown glass. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. 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 is Sellafields great quandary. 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 government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. 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. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. Iodine tablets, however, are relevant only to circumstances where radioactive iodine is present and this is not always the case. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good maintenance and simulations to trust their weapons work. Atomic weapons are highly complex, surprisingly sensitive, and often pretty old. Last year, BBC's Panorama exposed safety concerns at the plant after a tip-off from a whistleblower, including allegations of inadequate staffing levels and poor maintenance. Watch this video ad-free on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/real-life-lore-what-happens-if-yellowstone-blows-up-tomorrowPlease Subscribe: http://bit.ly/2dB7. At least you can reason with AI. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. 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 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. For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. It is understood to be the Government's intention that very shortly iodine tablets will be available to everybody to keep in their home, with reserve supplies also being held in key locations throughout the country. The document ran to 17,000 pages. 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. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. 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. In Taryl's final installment of 2020's Halloween how-to series, we bring you "The Glob". In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Glass degrades. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. Or how the site evolved from a farm to a nuclear icon and one of the biggest environmental clean-up challenges in Europe? ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. Once a vital part of the nation's. At one spot, our trackers went mad. 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. Any time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. Heat Pumps Sell Like Hotcakes on America's Oil-Rich Frontier. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. The difference in a "blown" engine . Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. How high will the sea rise? No possible version of the future can be discounted. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. 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. "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. At its heart is a giant pond full of radioactive . 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. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. 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. 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. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. I still get lost sometimes here, said Sanna Mustonen, a geologist with Posiva, even after all these years. After Onkalo takes in all its waste, these caverns will be sealed up to the surface with bentonite, a kind of clay that absorbs water, and that is often found in cat litter. 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. 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. 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. 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