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 . So it was like: OK, thats it? An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. It thought nothing of trying to block Wastwater lake to get more water or trying to mine the national park for a waste dump. Video, 00:01:03Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Up Next. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. Their further degradation is a sure thing. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. It was a historic occasion. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. The two liquids mixed and exploded, destroying the orbiter with it. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? . Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. 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. Anywhere downwind of Sellafield during the releases would be rendered uninhabitable probably for generationsand people caught in the fall-out would have a greatly increased chance of getting cancer. 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. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. To take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. 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 . Dr Thompson said that the buildings designed in the 1950s could not withstand a crash from an airliner. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. But who wants nuclear waste buried in their backyard? . Logged. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. Here's a look at the technology being used in the clean-up operation. Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. How high will the sea rise? 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. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. Don't get me wrong. 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. 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. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. 6 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. Mario was too iconic to fail. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. 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. But, the book suggests, its sheer physical isolation may have been responsible for some of the deep fears that people have of nuclear power. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. Video, 00:00:28Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. It wasnt. At the moment, Nuclear Waste Services is in discussions with four communities about the potential to host a GDF. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. A drive around the perimeter takes 40 minutes. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. Of course the sun is only about 4.6 billion years old, half way through its lifespan of about 10 bil. The plant has changed. Sellafields isolated location, perched on the Cumbrian coast looking over to the Isle of Man, is also a slow death-warrant; the salty, corrosive sea air plays a lethal game of cat and mouse with the sites ageing infrastructure. They dont know exactly what theyll find in the silos and ponds. 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 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. 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. The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. Scientists believe lasting symptoms following a coronavirus infection is not a single disorder. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. 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. "I used to get very cross with their housing policy. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the early years of the nuclear age. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Video, 00:05:44Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, One-minute World News. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. 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. We power-walked past nonetheless. It all put me in mind of a man whod made a house of ice in deepest winter but now senses spring around the corner, and must move his furniture out before it all melts and collapses around him. The ceiling for now is 53bn. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. 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. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. 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. 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 . I was a non-desirable person on site.". Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. As well as being filled with waste during the early years of the nuclear age, Sellafields ponds were also overwhelmed with spent fuel during the 1974 miners strike. 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. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. 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. 2023 BBC. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? The Search for Long Covid Treatments Takes a Promising Turn. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. The video is spectacular. Seagulls chatter, the hum of machinery is constant, a pipe zig-zagging across the ground vents steam. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. Responding to worries about how robust these containers were, the government, in 1984, arranged to have a speeding train collide head-on with a flask. Weve got folks here who joined at 18 and have been here more than 40 years, working only in this building, said Lisa Dixon, an operations manager. The place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation.". Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. 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. With a delicacy not ordinarily required of it, the toilet brush wiped debris and algae off a skip until the digits 9738, painted in black, appeared on the skips flank. "It was a great job. 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. Things could get much worse. An emergency could occur following a fire, explosion, seismic event or serious leak in one of the areas handling radioactive materials at the Sellafield Site. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. 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.
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