what happens if sellafield blows up

what happens if sellafield blows up

The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. How radioactive waste ended up spending decades in open-air ponds is a story typical of Sellafields troubled past. 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. 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. 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. But the first consideration clearly has to be health. Fill a water bottle one-third full of vinegar. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. And it is intelligent. 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 room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. That would create a mixture of magma, rocks, vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases. 1. On the other hand, high-level waste the byproduct of reprocessing is so radioactive that its containers will give off heat for thousands of years. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. This is about self-regulation and responsibility. 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. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. 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. The buckets are then fed through an enclosed hole in the wall to a waiting RAPTOR master-slave robot arm encased in a box made of steel and 12mm reinforced glass. They dont know exactly what theyll find in the silos and ponds. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. 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. This is Sellafields great quandary. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. 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. 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. It makes sure that it's up for prime time when you get up. 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. I leased a beat and the song blew up, but some other artist has the exclusive rights. 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. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. 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. But the boxes, for now, are safe. 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. That forecast has aged poorly. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. 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. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. Put a funnel in the neck of a balloon, and hold onto the balloon neck and funnel. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. 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 at Sellafield, with all its caches of radioactivity, the thought of catastrophe is so ever-present that you feel your surroundings with a heightened keenness. Then, having. Generated revenues of 9bn, says site operator Sellafield Ltd. Ended operation November 2018. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. 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. On one of my afternoons in Sellafield, I was shown around a half-made building: a 1bn factory that would pack all the purified plutonium into canisters to be sent to a GDF. 1. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. How dry is it below ground? 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. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. Those neutrons generate more neutrons out of uranium atoms, which generate still more neutrons out of other uranium atoms, and so on, the whole process begetting vast quantities of heat that can turn water into steam and drive turbines. Sellafield took its present name only in 1981, in part to erase the old name, Windscale, and the associated memories of the fire. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. 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. 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. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. 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 plant. Slide the funnel out of the balloon and have your child hold the portion of the balloon with the . An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. First, would the effects of a terrorist attack be worse than an accident? The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. 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. Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste. Your call is important to us. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. Once sufficiently cooled, the spent fuel is moved by canal to Sellafields Head End Shear Cave where it is chopped up, dropped into a basket and dissolved in nitric acid. The air inside is so contaminated that in minutes youd be over your total dose for the year, Davey says of one room currently being decommissioned. 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. DeSantis won't say he's running. 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. 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. Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. In other areas of Sellafield, the levels of radiation are so extreme that no humans can ever enter. Material housed here will remain radioactive for 100,000 years. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. It is in keeping this exposure for each individual to a minimum that simple practical precautions will be absolutely vital. A second controlled explosion was then carried out at the same location shortly before 16:00 BST. When records couldnt be found, Sellafield staff conducted interviews with former employees. Sellafield said in a statement: "These chemicals are used extensively in many industries and are well understood. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. At 100mph, a part of the locomotive exploded and the train derailed. Nations dissolve. So clearly then, whether the initiating event is accidental or due to some form of terrorist action, the kind of consequences Ireland could suffer are essentially the same - exposure of people some hours later to radiation in the atmosphere. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield Remote submarines have explored and begun cleaning up old storage ponds. But then the pieces were left in the cell. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. Iodine tablets, however, are relevant only to circumstances where radioactive iodine is present and this is not always the case. 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. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. 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. All radioactivity is a search for stability. 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. An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. 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. Read about our approach to external linking. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. The institute's scrutiny will focus on whether a large. A Photographers Quest to Shoot Congos Deadliest Volcano. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. Where the waste goes next is controversial. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. 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. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. 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. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. 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. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. The possibility of this situation to occur is very unlikely if you handle . 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. Many of the earliest structures here, said Dan Bowman, the head of operations at one of Sellafields two waste storage ponds, werent even built with decommissioning in mind. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. 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. The UKs plans are at an earlier stage. Sellafield was the site in 1957 of one of the world's worst nuclear incidents. 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. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. The most important thing people can do to minimise their exposure in the initial period will be to stay indoors. What could possibly go wrong indeed. 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. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. Saw one explode from across the street. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. The Baking Soda Balloon Blow-Up Experiment. He was right, but only in theory. 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. 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 process will cost at least 121bn. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. We ducked through half-constructed corridors and emerged into the main, as-yet-roofless hall. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. 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. To take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good maintenance and simulations to trust their weapons work. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. 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. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. 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. 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. The reprocessing plants end was always coming. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. Avoiding consumption of contaminated food would be another essential element in the response to the emergency. Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. 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. 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. Once a vital part of the nation's. 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. Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. No possible version of the future can be discounted. Waste can travel incognito, to fatal effect: radioactive atoms carried by the wind or water, entering living bodies, riddling them with cancer, ruining them inside out. Feb 22, 2023. 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 short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. 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. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. It will be finished a century or so from now. Inches-Thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal 1950s now... 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what happens if sellafield blows up