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. 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. Once uranium and plutonium were extracted from used fuel rods, it was thought, they could be stored safely and perhaps eventually resold, to make money on the side. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. Video, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece, Record numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. For six weeks, Sellafields engineers prepared for the task, rehearsing on a 3D model, ventilating the cell, setting up a stream of air to blow away the molten metal, ensuring that nothing caught fire from the lasers sparks. 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. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. 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. What could possibly go wrong indeed. Read about our approach to external linking. 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 . But then the pieces were left in the cell. 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. What happens when the battery is fully charged but still connected? 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. In either case, a large volume of radioactive substances could rise into the atmosphere propelled by an explosion, a fire or both. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. A government inquiry was then held, but its report was not released in full until 1988. 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. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. 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. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. First, would the effects of a terrorist attack be worse than an accident? Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. Avoiding consumption of contaminated food would be another essential element in the response to the emergency. The site currently handles nearly all the radioactive waste generated by the UKs 15 operational nuclear reactors. Sellafield's presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. 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. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. 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. At its heart is a giant pond full of radioactive . 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. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. What's he waiting for? 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. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. Towards the end of the play, Biff attempts to expose Willy to the reality of . 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. Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. 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. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. 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. Read about our approach to external linking. Sellafield took its present name only in 1981, in part to erase the old name, Windscale, and the associated memories of the fire. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. 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. Here is the deal. 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. Still, it has lasted almost the entirety of the atomic age, witnessing both its earliest follies and its continuing confusions. Since September 11th, public concern in Ireland about Sellafield has taken on the added dimension of fear of a terrorist attack on the plant. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. Workers Are Dying in the EV Industrys Tainted City. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. 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 cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) Many of us put our phones and laptop charging during the night. 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 moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Saw one explode from across the street. A Photographers Quest to Shoot Congos Deadliest Volcano. 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. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. 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 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. It was on a charger and in the car with the hood up. It wasnt. Several guys were sprayed with acid but no serious injuries.<br /><br />Heard about one that was in a . 5. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. This was lucrative work. It turned out that if you werent looking to make plutonium nukes to blow up cities, Magnox was a pretty inefficient way to light up homes and power factories. Or how the site evolved from a farm to a nuclear icon and one of the biggest environmental clean-up challenges in Europe? The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). 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 silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. 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. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. 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. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. 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. 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. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. We power-walked past nonetheless. In an easterly wind, the cloud of radioactive material would reach the east coast of Ireland in a number of hours, depending on the speed of the wind. There is undoubtedly a strong segment of opinion among the Irish public that the effects on Ireland of such an event would be so devastating that it would be futile to try to implement any form of protective measures. 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. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. It is now home to a one-tonne BROKK-90 demolition machine which smashes up sections of the lab and loads them into plastic buckets on a conveyer belt. 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. There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. Atomic weapons are highly complex, surprisingly sensitive, and often pretty old. 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. 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. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. 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. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. 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. The skips of extricated waste will be compacted to a third of their volume, grouted and moved into another Sellafield warehouse; at some point, they will be sequestered in the ground, in the GDF that is, at present, hypothetical. "It is urgent that we clean up these ponds [but] it will be decades before they are . Sellafield was the site in 1957 of one of the world's worst nuclear incidents. 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. In comparison, consider how different the world looked a mere 7,000 years ago, when a determined pedestrian could set out from the Humber estuary, in northern England, and walk across to the Netherlands and then to Norway. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. If new nuclear does go ahead in the UK then the technology will be French, Japanese or American. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. 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. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. 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. Slide the funnel out of the balloon and have your child hold the portion of the balloon with the . The reprocessing plants end was always coming. THE Irish population is "a sitting duck" in the event of a nuclear accident at Sellafield, Green Party deputy leader, Mary White warned yesterday. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. 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. 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. And the waste keeps piling up. 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. And it is intelligent. 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 speedy implementation of basic protective measures in the first hours and the following few days after the event can greatly reduce the exposure of individuals at risk and, therefore, greatly improve the ultimate health outcome for the population. How high will the sea rise? Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. Once the room is cleared, humans can go in. Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. A healthy person ingests around 1.5 litres of nasal secretions a day, so sniffing and swallowing isn't harmful. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. She meets aunts and cousins on her shifts all the time. We must assume, however, that we might not be so lucky. Launches are confirmed and verified. 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. 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