Is Hinkley Point closing? - TimesMojo But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. Conditions inside the Shear Cave are intense: all operations are carried out remotely using robots, with the waste producing 280 sieverts of radiation per hour - more than 60 times the deadly dose. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. "It's not fancy technology, it's not somebody from Oxford that's come up with this, says Richard Edmondson, operations manager at Sellafield, standing beside a looming stack of the concrete monoliths. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. 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. What If Betelgeuse Exploded Right Now? Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. 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. It says something for how Britain's nuclear establishment worked from the start that when Windscale No1 Pile caught fire in October 1957, it was hushed up so well that even with 11 tons of uranium ablaze for three days, the reactor close to collapse and radioactive material spreading across the Lake District, the people who worked there were expected to keep quiet and carry on making plutonium for the bomb. If an emergency does occur, radioactive airborne contamination may be The 1986b Chernobyl meltdown generated a blast the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs when a reactor exploded and burned. Much of the facility is now being decommissioned. And that put the frighteners on us because we had small children. "I often think there will have been a Seascale cluster of leukaemia because that's where the fallout from the big chimneys was closest. 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. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. 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 cancer. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. Other countries also plan to banish their nuclear waste into GDFs. 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. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. Sellafield Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA. But, the book suggests, its sheer physical isolation may have been responsible for some of the deep fears that people have of nuclear power. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. . But we also know from the interviews that it was largely thanks to the courage of deputy general manager Tom Tuohy that the Lake District is still habitable today. What do Sellafield Ltd do? - Thecrucibleonscreen.com We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the early years of the nuclear age. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Western Europe, reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, splitting it into plutonium, uranium and waste. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. SATURN READY TO EXPLODE - Weekly World News If the Saturn V went boom: The effects of a Saturn V - The Space Review 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. 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. I remember my dad saying the nuclear scientists thought they were "little gods" and my mum demanding that our medical records include the fact we were at school so close to the reactors. Management, profligate with money, was criminally careless with safety and ecology. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. Is Sellafield worse than Chernobyl? What If 7.16M subscribers 1.9M views 3 years ago #Betelgeuse At about 950 times bigger than our Sun, Betelgeuse is one of the biggest stars in our Universe.. There are a few reasons why they detonate before hitting the target: one, an 'air burst' renders more damage over a larger area without actually hitting anything. Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. 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. Video, 00:00:28Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. 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. 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. Sellafield nuclear disaster would spread across Cumbria - new map shows It wasnt. The outside of the container is decontaminated before it is moved to Sellafields huge vitrified product store, an air-cooled facility currently home to 6,000 containers. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. It was a historic occasion. Sellafield chemical find prompts bomb squad visit - BBC News The bad news from the new management? During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. 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 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. The place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. What happens if Sellafield is bombed? The government built 26 such reactors across the country. 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. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. 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. The document ran to 17,000 pages. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. What Would Happen to Earth if Mars Suddenly Exploded - YouTube The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. Video, 00:01:07Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. Correction: we mixed up the Sun's lifespan with its age. 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. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. No possible version of the future can be discounted. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. 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. Every family has someone who worked there or has somehow benefited from it. As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. Dr Thompson's report, sent this week in response to the committee's call for new evidence following a report it published last month, is likely further to alarm the Irish government, which has repeatedly protested about danger from the high level waste tanks at Sellafield. 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. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. 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. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. It would have . Now I look back and think, no, we caused that," says McManus. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. Jeremy Hunt wants nuclear power classed as sustainable: is it? The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. The air was pure Baltic brine. Material housed here will remain radioactive for 100,000 years. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. All rights reserved. But the boxes, for now, are safe. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. I was a radiation leper. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. 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. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Video, 00:00:32One-minute World News, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. (modern). Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. But the pursuit of commercial reprocessing turned Sellafield and a similar French site into de facto waste dumps, the journalist Stephanie Cooke found in her book In Mortal Hands. 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. What Atherton really wanted to show off, though, was a new waste retrieval system: a machine as big as a studio apartment, designed from scratch over two decades and built at a cost of 100m. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. An anonymous whistleblower who used to be a senior manager at Sellafield told the broadcasters Panorama programme that he worried about the safety of the site every day. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. 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. Can you visit nuclear power plants? - AnswersAll 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. 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. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site 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. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. 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. The future is rosy. And the waste keeps piling up. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. 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. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. 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 lab operated in the 1970s and produced the Plutonium-238 used in early cardiac pacemakers and as a primary fuel source for Nasas deep space missions where solar energy isnt available. Glass degrades. He was right, but only in theory. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. 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 number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. But some folk could laugh it off. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. The waste comes in on rails. So it was like: OK, thats it? Video, 00:01:15Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. 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. 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 skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? This is what will happen when Trump is arrested. 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? 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. The gravitational force due to the black hole is so strong that not even light could escape, never mind fragments of any kind ofexplosion, even a matter/anti-matter explosion in which all matter is converted into radiation. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. Sellafield took its present name only in 1981, in part to erase the old name, Windscale, and the associated memories of the fire. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. Perhaps, the study suggested, the leukaemia had an undetected, infectious cause. Even if a GDF receives its first deposit in the 2040s, the waste has to be delivered and put away with such exacting caution that it can be filled and closed only by the middle of the 22nd century. (modern), Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. Seven rare cancers were found in the small Seascale community between 1955 and 1983, yet the authorities "proved" this was due to the natural movement of people. 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 government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. When records couldnt be found, Sellafield staff conducted interviews with former employees. Dr Thompson said that the buildings designed in the 1950s could not withstand a crash from an airliner. 6 An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time.
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