If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. Then, at last, the reprocessing plant will be placed on fire watch, visited periodically to ensure nothing in the building is going up in flames, but otherwise left alone for decades for its radioactivity to dwindle, particle by particle. The fact that much of the workforce was drawn from the declining local iron ore and coal mines may explain the camaraderie of the workers and the vibrant community. The less you know about it the less you can tell anyone else.". 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. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) The most vulnerable part of the facilities at Sellafield, dating back to the 1950s, contain giant tanks of high level radioactive waste which has to be constantly cooled and stirred to prevent a chain reaction. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. This was lucrative work. 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 leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. Its an existential threat to link-in-bio companies. 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. Video, 00:01:07Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. And thats the least zany thing about it. It marked Sellafields transition from an operational facility to a depot devoted purely to storage and containment. We power-walked past nonetheless. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. . o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. This is what creates a Type II supernova: the core-collapse of an ultra-massive star. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. 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. Below us, submerged in water, lay decades worth of intermediate-level waste not quite as radioactive as spent fuel rods, but more harmful than low-level paper towels. if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. And here, over roughly 20m years, the uranium and other bits of space dust and debris cohered to form our planet in such a way that the violent tectonics of the young Earth pushed the uranium not towards its hot core but up into the folds of its crust. If the geology is simple, and were disposing of just high- and intermediate-level waste, then were thinking 20bn, said Jonathan Turner, a geologist with Nuclear Waste Services. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. My relationship began at 13 when I went to school at St Bees, just three miles away. 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 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. They told me I had a lung burden and that was an accumulation from the 30-odd years I'd worked at Sellafield. Material housed here will remain radioactive for 100,000 years. "You kept quiet. It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. I left in 1990 a free man but plutonium-exposed. 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. The UKs plans are at an earlier stage. Crab Supernova Explosion [1080p] Watch on. 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. At one spot, our trackers went mad. "I could always tell when my husband had been irradiated because his hair was standing on end when he came home," says Pam Eldred, wife of Wally. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. As well as the threat of a bomb, missile or hijacked plane hitting Sellafield, Dr Thompson raises the possibility of a rogue worker or terrorist infiltrator at Sellafield sabotaging the cooling equipment which prevents the stored waste from boiling and causing a massive radioactive release. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. 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. 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. 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. How dry is it below ground? Is Sellafield worse than Chernobyl? In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. 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. Can Sellafield be bombed? New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. 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. Dr Thompson, who was based in the UK for 10 years and gave evidence at the 1977 Windscale inquiry into reprocessing at Sellafield, and the Sizewell inquiry, is an expert on the potential fallout from a nuclear accident or deliberate act of terrorism. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. If Onkalo begins operating on schedule, in 2025, it will be the worlds first GDF for spent fuel and high-level reactor waste 6,500 tonnes of the stuff, all from Finnish nuclear stations. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. 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. I'm not sure if this would be fatal but it's not good. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. A terrorist attack on Sellafield could render the north of England uninhabitable and release 100 times the radioactivity produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the House of Commons defence committee was told yesterday. You see, an explosion usually inflicts damage in two major ways . The 1986b Chernobyl meltdown generated a blast the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs when a reactor exploded and burned. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. What happens if Sellafield is bombed? The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Video, 00:01:03, Up Next. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. It recklessly dumped contaminated water out to sea and filled old mines with radioactive waste. But you know you were scared stiff really. 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. How radioactive waste ended up spending decades in open-air ponds is a story typical of Sellafields troubled past. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. Everyone in West Cumbria has a relationship with Sellafield. The Search for Long Covid Treatments Takes a Promising Turn. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. Where the waste goes next is controversial. The leak caused 83 cubic metres of nitric acid solution to seep from a broken pipe into a secondary containment chamber - a stainless steel tub encased in two-metre-thick reinforced concrete with a capacity of 250 cubic metres. 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. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. 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. This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. 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. Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said he believed that documents from both the nuclear industry and the government showed neither had ever attempted a thorough analysis of the threat or the options for reducing it. 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. Video, 00:00:33, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. 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. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. I was a non-desirable person on site.". For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. Part of the Sellafield site in Cumbria has been evacuated and an explosives disposal team called in after the discovery of dangerous chemicals. 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. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Queen Elizabeth II at the opening ceremony of the Windscale nuclear power station, later known as Sellafield, in 1956. ome industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. Video, 00:01:03Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Up Next. What Could Happen-Radiation? Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. For the next decade, it was central to the UK's nuclear weapons programme, before it was taken over by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in 1954. 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 . Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. It wasnt. 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. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. "He was standing there putting water in and if things had gone wrong with the water it had never been tried before on a reactor fire if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. Jeremy Hunt wants nuclear power classed as sustainable: is it? Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. If you lived on a certain street, you were of a certain status within the works. But how did Sellafield become Europe's nuclear dustbin and the target of so much hostility to nuclear power? Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. 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. 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. 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. It would have been like Chernobyl there was contamination everywhere, on the golf course, in the milk, in chickens but it was quickly forgotten about," says McManus. How will the rock bear up if, in the next ice age, tens of thousands of years from today, a kilometre or two of ice forms on the surface? Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. The future is rosy. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. 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. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the early years of the nuclear age. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. 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. A 10-storey building called B204 had been Sellafields first reprocessing facility, but in 1973, a rogue chemical reaction filled the premises with radioactive gas. Much of the facility is now being decommissioned. 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. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. 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. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. Any time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. Theres no fuel coming in. I dont think its really hit the team just yet.. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. Scientists believe lasting symptoms following a coronavirus infection is not a single disorder. 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. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. These are our favorite classic flicks, Marvel movies, and Star Wars sagas on the streaming platform. But the boxes, for now, are safe. Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is a place where multiple time spans some fleeting, some cosmic drift in and out of view. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. The House of Mouse has plenty of streaming options for the whole family. A super-massive black hole couldn't explode. 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. An automated dismantling machine, remote-controlled manipulator arm and crane were used to take it apart piece by piece, leaving only the concrete biological shield and iconic, aluminium-clad shell. This has been corrected. 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. 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. 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. More than 140 tonnes of plutonium are stored in giant. Video, 00:00:19, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. 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. 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. 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. 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. 6 Amid tight security at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, is a store holding most of Britain's stockpile of plutonium. "Things did go wrong so you just didn'ttake any notice. He was right, but only in theory. For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. Instead of bumbling, British, gung ho pioneers, Sellafield is now run by corporate PR folk and slick American businessmen. What Would Happen to Earth if Mars Suddenly Exploded The Infographics Show 12.7M subscribers 8.1K 288K views 10 months ago The end of the world could come from another World War, or a natural. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. Video, 00:05:44, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. The document ran to 17,000 pages. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. ", 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. 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. Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. These people have pontificated about bringing the stuff in from outside systems and that would give the kids leukaemia. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks.