More than 140 tonnes of plutonium are stored in giant. 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. Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. All radioactivity is a search for stability. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. I was a non-desirable person on site.". It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. The future is rosy. Game adaptations after him will have to try harder. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. 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. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. After a brief, initial flash, Betelgeuse will brighten tremendously . What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. 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. 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. But Teller was glossing over the details, namely: the expense of keeping waste safe, the duration over which it has to be maintained, the accidents that could befall it, the fallout of those accidents. 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 . Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. I was a radiation leper. 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. 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. 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, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. The Commons defence committee in its report said that "attention has particularly focused on perceived vulnerability of nuclear installations". In Sellafield, these nuclear divers will put on radiation-proof wetsuits and tidy up the pond floor, reaching the places where robotic arms cannot go. 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 laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. To take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. So in a couple of thousand years the Earth and the Solar System would be enveloped in hot, highly ionized gas. 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. 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. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. 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. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. The problem is that the plant which is supposed to turn this liquid waste into more managable and less dangerous glass blocks has never worked properly and a backlog cannot be cleared for another 15 years. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. The plant has changed. That one there, thats the second most dangerous, says Andrew Cooney, technical manager at Sellafield, nodding in the direction of another innocuous-looking site on the vast complex. A drive around the perimeter takes 40 minutes. They told me I had a lung burden and that was an accumulation from the 30-odd years I'd worked at Sellafield. 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. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. Security scares at Sellafield nuclear waste plant raise fears of Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. 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. 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. We power-walked past nonetheless. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. New clinical trials could more effectively reach solutions. But the boxes, for now, are safe. These are our favorite classic flicks, Marvel movies, and Star Wars sagas on the streaming platform. Earlier this year WIRED was given rare access to Sellafield, a sprawling collection of buildings dating back to the first atom-splitting flash of the nuclear age. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. 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. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. 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. Video, 00:00:19, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. But some folk could laugh it off. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. 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. The ceiling for now is 53bn. 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. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. 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. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. Meta is finally allowing people to add more links to their Instagram profiles. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. He was right, but only in theory. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. What is building B30 in Sellafield? - Worldsrichpeople.com 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. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. We ran punishment runs past it, danced at Calder girls school, kissed the daughters of the scientists, were jeered at by the workers for wearing shorts and we got shown round it, I am almost certain, by Tom Tuohy, whose son was at school with us. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. 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 is what creates a Type II supernova: the core-collapse of an ultra-massive star. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. At the moment, Nuclear Waste Services is in discussions with four communities about the potential to host a GDF. How dry is it below ground? Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. Near-Earth supernova - Wikipedia But the years-long process of scooping waste out can also feel crude and time-consuming like emptying a wheelie bin with a teaspoon, Phil Atherton, a manager working with the silo team, told me. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield - BBC News 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? 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. Hinkley Point C, the first new nuclear plant in a generation, is being built in Somerset, but its cost has bloated to more than 25bn. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. 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. Inside Sellafield, the UK's most dangerous nuclear site - WIRED UK 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 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. Damon Lindelofs new Peacock series is about a tech-averse nun on a quest for the Holy Grail. Once the room is cleared, humans can go in. When you asked, 'How many would you expect in a community of 2,000 people?' The site currently handles nearly all the radioactive waste generated by the UKs 15 operational nuclear reactors. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. The House of Mouse has plenty of streaming options for the whole family. So it was like: OK, thats it? It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. The GDF will effectively entomb not just decades of nuclear waste but also the decades-old idea that atomic energy will be both easy and cheap the very idea that drove the creation of Sellafield, where the worlds earliest nuclear aspirations began. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. 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 . Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. Everybodys thinking: What do we do? Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. Has fiddlers ferry power station closed? The snake, though, could slither right in through a hole drilled into a cell wall, and right up to a two-metre-high, double-walled steel vat once used to dissolve fuel in acid. 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. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. But how did Sellafield become Europe's nuclear dustbin and the target of so much hostility to nuclear power? The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. All rights reserved. (modern), Archive British Path footage of a 1957 news report on radioactive dust escaping from Windscale. ", 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. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. Amid tight security at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, is a store holding most of Britain's stockpile of plutonium. (modern). In comparison, consider how different the world looked a mere 7,000 years ago, when a determined pedestrian could set out from the Humber estuary, in northern England, and walk across to the Netherlands and then to Norway. Management, profligate with money, was criminally careless with safety and ecology. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. Now it needs to clean-up Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. 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. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. Can you visit nuclear power plants? - AnswersAll Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, . Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. 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 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. At one spot, our trackers went mad. This is Sellafields great quandary. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. 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. 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. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. And the waste keeps piling up. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. What do Sellafield Ltd do? - Thecrucibleonscreen.com This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. 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. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. 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. It wasnt. Overseas reprocessing contracts signed since 1976 require that this vitrified waste is returned to the country of origin, meaning Sellafield now only has responsibility for storing the UKs vitrified waste. Sellafield nuclear site a 'toxic mix of bullying and harassment' The video is spectacular. 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. This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. It was a historic occasion. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. More dangerous still are the 20 tonnes of melted fuel inside a reactor that caught fire in 1957 and has been sealed off and left alone ever since. This must be one of the biggest questions yet and is on everyone's mind. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. Video, 00:01:15, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. Video, 00:05:44Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, One-minute World News. The UKs plans are at an earlier stage. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. But the economy of the region is more dependent on nuclear than ever before; the MP, Jamie Reed, is a former press officer for Sellafield and no one dares say anything critical if they want to keep a job. 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. Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. It is these two sites, known as First Generation Magnox Storage Pond and the Magnox Swarf Storage Silos, that are referred to as the most hazardous in Western Europe. But who wants nuclear waste buried in their backyard? The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. What does the future hold for Sellafield? - Science and Engineering Video, 00:00:35Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. 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. Accidents had to be modelled. Sellafield nuclear disaster would spread across Cumbria - new map shows The best way to neutralise its threat is to move it into a subterranean vault, of the kind the UK plans to build later this century. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? We power-walked past nonetheless. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. If an emergency does occur, radioactive airborne contamination may be Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. But you know you were scared stiff really. The skips of extricated waste will be compacted to a third of their volume, grouted and moved into another Sellafield warehouse; at some point, they will be sequestered in the ground, in the GDF that is, at present, hypothetical. That forecast has aged poorly. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Video, 00:00:19Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. Until then, Bowman and others will bend their ingenuity to a seemingly self-contradictory exercise: dismantling Sellafield while keeping it from falling apart along the way. Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. 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. They dont know how much time theyll need to mop up all the waste, or how long theyll have to store it, or what Sellafield will look like afterwards. 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. The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. "A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. 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. 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. As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. It would have . He was right, but only in theory. 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. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. Here's a look at the technology being used in the clean-up operation. 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, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. Video, 00:00:33Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. Nations dissolve. The task of shooting down a hijacked commercial airliner has been assigned to RAF Tornado F3 fighters based at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. Glass degrades. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium.