It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. Video, 00:00:35Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. The waste comes in on rails. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. Just like in 1957. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. What happens if Sellafield is bombed? The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. Crab Supernova Explosion [1080p] Watch on. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. 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. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. This is what will happen when Trump is arrested. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Video, 00:00:28, Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. You see, an explosion usually inflicts damage in two major ways . From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. Every month one of 13 easy-to-access boxes is lifted onto a platform and inspected on all sides for signs of damage and leakage. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. 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. 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. A near-Earth supernova is an explosion resulting from the death of a star that occurs close enough to the Earth (roughly less than 10 to 300 parsecs (30 to 1000 light-years) away) to have noticeable effects on Earth's biosphere.. An estimated 20 supernova explosions have happened within 300 pc of the Earth over the last 11 million years. After a brief, initial flash, Betelgeuse will brighten tremendously . In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. 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. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. 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. It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. What If Betelgeuse Exploded Right Now? 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. What Could Happen-Radiation? 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. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. 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. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. It was useless with people, too. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. A government inquiry was then held, but its report was not released in full until 1988. 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. The task of shooting down a hijacked commercial airliner has been assigned to RAF Tornado F3 fighters based at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. 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. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. Everybodys thinking: What do we do? Sellafield Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA. "I often think there will have been a Seascale cluster of leukaemia because that's where the fallout from the big chimneys was closest. 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. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. 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. Video, 00:01:03Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Up Next. It was a historic occasion. The two liquids mixed and exploded, destroying the orbiter with it. Its the largest such hoard of plutonium in the world, but it, too, is a kind of waste, simply because nobody wants it for weapons any more, or knows what else to do with it. 2023 BBC. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. 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. The sites reprocessing contracts are due to expire in four years but clean-up may take more than 100 years and cost up to 162 billion. Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. Here's Dick Raaz, the outgoing head of the waste depository: "The good news about radioactive waste is it self-destructs, if you just give it long enough." 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. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. Can you visit Sizewell B? 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. A true monster of a launch vehicle, it generated over 33 million newtons of thrust at liftoff and carried 2.5 million kilograms of fuel and oxidizer. 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. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. In March 2015 work began to pump 1,500 cubic metres of radioactive sludge from the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond, enough to fill seven double-decker buses. No possible version of the future can be discounted. It wasnt. At one spot, our trackers went mad. I left in 1990 a free man but plutonium-exposed. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. I was a radiation leper. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. 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. This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. 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 rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. The day before I met Dixon, technicians had fed one final batch of spent fuel into acid and that was that, the end of reprocessing. 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. What emerges is the intimate, honest, sometimes ugly story of how a wartime bomb factory was dumped in one of Britain's most cut-off areas, turned to producing plutonium for the atom bomb, then nuclear electricity and is now a American-led multinational corporation decommissioning the mess that it largely created. 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. Well, from the interviews with Raaz, Reed and former Sellafield boss Barry Snelson, there isn't any. Instead of bumbling, British, gung ho pioneers, Sellafield is now run by corporate PR folk and slick American businessmen. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. and were told, 'Perhaps one in 20 years' and you'd had three in a year that's something to bother about. It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. 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. 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 . 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 . Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. Video, 00:01:07Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. 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. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. No. We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle, Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) Its an existential threat to link-in-bio companies. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. Every family has someone who worked there or has somehow benefited from it. But the boxes, for now, are safe. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. The place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. ", 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. It might not have a home yet, but the countrys first geological disposal facility will be vast: surface buildings are expected to cover 1km sq and underground tunnels will stretch for up to 20 km sq. He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. 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. This was lucrative work. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Western Europe, reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, splitting it into plutonium, uranium and waste. 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. There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Depending on the direction of the wind, cities like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Leeds would be well within fallout range, as would be Dublin. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. "A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. Can Sellafield be bombed? 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. The Search for Long Covid Treatments Takes a Promising Turn. How radioactive waste ended up spending decades in open-air ponds is a story typical of Sellafields troubled past. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. In the waters gloom, cameras offer little help, he said: Youre mostly playing by feel. In the two preceding months, the team had pulled out enough waste to fill four skips. 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. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? The sun bounces off metal everywhere. Barrels containing high-level radioactive nuclear waste stored in a pool at Sellafield, in 2002. ike malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste.
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