what would happen if sellafield exploded

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. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. 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. 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. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. To take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. Video, 00:00:19Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. Where the waste goes next is controversial. Their further degradation is a sure thing. It was a historic occasion. 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. After a brief, initial flash, Betelgeuse will brighten tremendously . "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. 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. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. The document ran to 17,000 pages. Amid tight security at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, is a store holding most of Britain's stockpile of plutonium. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. Any time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. 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. Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. 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. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. Video, 00:00:19, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. 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 said: "A civilian nuclear facility is a potential radiological weapon if the facility contains a large amount of radioactive material that can be released into the environment. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. 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. 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. 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. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, . 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. There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. 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. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. 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. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. Don't get me wrong. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. Part of the Sellafield site in Cumbria has been evacuated and an explosives disposal team called in after the discovery of dangerous chemicals. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. 2023 BBC. 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. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. 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." For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as 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. 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. Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. The book includes interviews with Sellafield foremen, scientists, managers, farmers, labourers, anti-nuclear activists, the vicar, the MP and bank manager, policemen, physicists, welders and accountants. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. 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 . In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. 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, 00:01:07Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. The place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. 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. 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. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. "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. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. This was lucrative work. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. Depending on the direction of the wind, cities like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Leeds would be well within fallout range, as would be Dublin. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. In January 2015, the government sacked the private consortium that had been running the Sellafield site since 2008. The future is rosy. 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. Perhaps, the study suggested, the leukaemia had an undetected, infectious cause. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. The solution, for now, is vitrification. 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. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. It was useless with people, too. 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. 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. How radioactive waste ended up spending decades in open-air ponds is a story typical of Sellafields troubled past. This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. The task of shooting down a hijacked commercial airliner has been assigned to RAF Tornado F3 fighters based at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. 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. A supernova remnant such as the Crab Nebula is about 11 light-year in diameter (and expanding at 0.5% the speed of light), and that star exploded about 1000 years ago. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. 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. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. 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. 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 area includes as far south as Walney, east as Bowness and north almost to the Scottish border. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. ", 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. Sellafield, formerly a Royal Ordnance Factory, began producing plutonium in 1947. Now it needs to clean-up. 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. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. But in the atoms of some elements like uranium or plutonium, protons and neutrons are crammed into their nuclei in ways that make them unsteady make them radioactive. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. 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. But then the pieces were left in the cell. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. A B&Q humidity meter sits on the wall of the near-dark warehouse, installed when the boxes were first moved here to check if humidity would be an issue for storage. Watch. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) What would happen if Sellafield exploded? A report from Steve Healey, the chief fire officer for Cumbria, revealed the affected area covers a 50-kilometre circular zone from an epicentre at Sellafield. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. Instead of bumbling, British, gung ho pioneers, Sellafield is now run by corporate PR folk and slick American businessmen. Video, 00:05:44, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. How high will the sea rise? These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. 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. I left in 1990 a free man but plutonium-exposed. Now its operators are in a race against time to make the most dangerous areas safe. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. Here's a look at the technology being used in the clean-up operation. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. 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 breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. 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. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. 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. Jeremy Hunt accused of 20bn gamble on nuclear energy and carbon capture, 50m fund will boost UK nuclear fuel projects, ministers say, Hopes for power and purpose from an energy industry in flux, EUs emissions continue to fall despite return to coal, Despite the hype, we shouldnt bank on nuclear fusion to save the world from climate catastrophe, Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean near-limitless energy, Sizewell C confirmed again this time it might be the real deal. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Accidents had to be modelled. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. 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 is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. He was right, but only in theory. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. 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. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? "I used to get very cross with their housing policy. At one spot, our trackers went mad. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. "It was a great job. 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. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. (modern), Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. 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 . The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. 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 UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. 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. 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. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. My relationship began at 13 when I went to school at St Bees, just three miles away. 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. At 100mph, a part of the locomotive exploded and the train derailed. It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. Video, 00:00:32One-minute World News, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. 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. And the waste keeps piling up. The bad news from the new management? It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. When records couldnt be found, Sellafield staff conducted interviews with former employees. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick.

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