what happens if sellafield blows up
The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. 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. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle, Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) 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. Other remote machines are being used to take cameras deep inside decaying. Prominence has been given to the use of iodine tablets as a means of limiting radiation dose. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. 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. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. Atomic weapons are highly complex, surprisingly sensitive, and often pretty old. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. 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. It will be finished a century or so from now. It is vital that it be brought home to every member of the public that this would not be the case. 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. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. How high will the sea rise? Multiple simultaneous launches are detected 2. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. Then it is vitrified: mixed with three parts glass beads and a little sugar, until it turns into a hot block of dirty-brown glass. Once in the facility, the lid bolts on the flasks are removed and the fuel is lowered into a small pool of water and taken out of the flask. 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. Once radiation arrives, the national network of radiation monitoring stations, supplemented by mobile monitoring units of the Defence Forces and Civil Defence, will enable movement of the radiation cloud to be tracked and radiation levels in each area to be quantified. Lets go home, Dixon said. 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. There is undoubtedly a strong segment of opinion among the Irish public that the effects on Ireland of such an event would be so devastating that it would be futile to try to implement any form of protective measures. Questions 1, 2 and 3 are probably in my top 10 of most frequently asked questions. So clearly then, whether the initiating event is accidental or due to some form of terrorist action, the kind of consequences Ireland could suffer are essentially the same - exposure of people some hours later to radiation in the atmosphere. However, using improper technique may cause problem. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. 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. 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. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. This is about self-regulation and responsibility. The difference in a "blown" engine . Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. 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. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. 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. Biologists are working to quickly grow hardier specimens that can be propagated and transplanted by robotic arms. It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. When they arrived over the years, during the heyday of reprocessing, the skips were unloaded into pools so haphazardly that Sellafield is now having to build an underwater map of what is where, just to know best how to get it all out. 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. Avoiding consumption of contaminated food would be another essential element in the response to the emergency. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. Britain's post war dreams of being a world leader in nuclear energy lie in radioactive ruins in Sellafield. Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. 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. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six square kilometre site, Sellafield has its own train station, police force and fire service, Some buildings at Sellafield date back to the late-1950s when the UK was racing to build its first nuclear bomb, Low and intermediate-level radioactive waste is temporarially being stored in 50-tonne concrete blocks, Much of Sellafield's decomissioning work is done by robots to protect humans from deadly levels of radiation, The cavernous Thorp facility reprocesses spent nuclear fuel from the UK and overseas, Cumbria County Council rejected an application. 2023 BBC. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. In Alaska, people are flocking to buy electric appliances instead of fuel-guzzling furnaces, as oil prices soar and temperatures plummet. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. 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. Two Cumbrian enviromental protestors fined for blocking London road, Campaign launched for stroke and coronary care services at hospital, Grants fund learning and land management at Cumbrian farm, Starbucks to open in Ulverston this Friday, Learning hub opens in Ulverston for children with special needs, Belgian Beer Festival to take place in Kendal, Human error to blame for deadly train crash, says Greek PM, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. Sellafield took its present name only in 1981, in part to erase the old name, Windscale, and the associated memories of the fire. Nuclear plants keep so much water on hand to cool fuel, moderate the reactors heat, or generate steam that a class of specialist divers works only in the ponds and tanks at these plants, inspecting and repairing them. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Endoscopes are poked through lead-clad walls before robotic demolition machines and master-slave arms are installed to break up and safely store the waste. 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. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. 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. Generated revenues of 9bn, says site operator Sellafield Ltd. Ended operation November 2018. 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. After a failed attempt to ask Mr. Oliver for a business loan, Biff steals Mr. Oliver's fountain pen from his desk. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. Since December 2019, Dixon said, Ive only had 16 straight days of running the plant at any one time. Best to close it down to conduct repairs, clean the machines and take them apart. Then it generated electricity for the National Grid, until 2003. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. 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. I still get lost sometimes here, said Sanna Mustonen, a geologist with Posiva, even after all these years. After Onkalo takes in all its waste, these caverns will be sealed up to the surface with bentonite, a kind of clay that absorbs water, and that is often found in cat litter. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. Many of the earliest structures here, said Dan Bowman, the head of operations at one of Sellafields two waste storage ponds, werent even built with decommissioning in mind. The most important thing people can do to minimise their exposure in the initial period will be to stay indoors. 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. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. What would happen if the entire world launched nukes at the US at the same time? Sellafield's presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. 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. If Al Queda decide to hit hit sellafield with anything bigger than a Lear jet, it would most likely spell the end of the eastern seaboard of ireland being anything approaching inhabitable for a very long time. Seagulls chatter, the hum of machinery is constant, a pipe zig-zagging across the ground vents steam. Among the sites cramped jumble of facilities are two 60-year-old ponds filled with hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods. The prevailing wind being south-westerly, we might hope that this material would be blown away from us, rather than towards us. 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. Sellafield's Magnox plant will stop reprocessing in July 2022 and enter a new era of clean-up and decommissioning. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. 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 was lucrative work. Read about our approach to external linking. One heckofa bang, blew the hood off the car and there was a cloud of vapor. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. This is Sellafields great quandary. About 9,000 people are employed at the Sellafield site The estimated cost of cleaning up the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria has risen by almost 2.5bn in a year, a report has. The highly radioactive fuel is then transferred next door into an even bigger pool where its stored and cooled for between three and five years. As the nation's priorities shifted,. What will occur is exposure to radiation in the atmosphere, in rainfall, in food and in water, resulting in the risk of long-term health effects, most notably increased incidence of cancer in future years. Video, Record numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story, BBC's Panorama exposed safety concerns at the plant, Prince Andrew offered Frogmore Cottage - reports, Beer and wine sales in Canada fall to all-time low, Bieber cancels remaining Justice world tour dates, Trump lashes out at Murdoch over vote fraud case, Man survives 31 days in jungle by eating worms, Eli Lilly caps monthly insulin costs in US at $35, Ed Sheeran says wife developed tumour in pregnancy, China and Belarus call for peace in Ukraine. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. 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. The air was pure Baltic brine. Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. We must assume, however, that we might not be so lucky. So it was like: OK, thats it? Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. 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. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. Have you ever wondered what happens behind Sellafield's security fences? Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. The main reason power companies and governments arent keener on nuclear power is not that activists are holding them back or that uranium is difficult to find, but that producing it safely is just proving too expensive. Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. The leak caused 83 cubic metres of nitric acid solution to seep from a broken pipe into a secondary containment chamber - a stainless steel tub encased in two-metre-thick reinforced concrete with a capacity of 250 cubic metres. Answer: I answered a similar question here: Larry Moss's answer to Is there any danger with blowing up balloons? In certain other circumstances, their availability could, of course, be very important. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. On April 20, 2005 Sellafield workers found a huge leak at Thorp, which first started in July 2004. He was right, but only in theory. 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. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. fully-fuelled aircraft could directly impact on the highest-risk plants at the site without resulting in the release to the atmosphere of a very large quantity of radioactivity. If new nuclear does go ahead in the UK then the technology will be French, Japanese or American. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. Effective restrictions on supply of such milk or other affected foods would have to be put in place. The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. Robots Enter the Race to Save Dying Coral Reefs. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. 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. A drive around the perimeter takes 40 minutes. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. Here is the deal. That would create a mixture of magma, rocks, vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases. "It is urgent that we clean up these ponds [but] it will be decades before they are . This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. Theres no fuel coming in. I dont think its really hit the team just yet.. 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. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. 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. THE Irish population is "a sitting duck" in the event of a nuclear accident at Sellafield, Green Party deputy leader, Mary White warned yesterday. At a conference in Drogheda at the weekend, BNFL invited the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland to review the analysis, and we will be taking up this invitation without delay. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. In an easterly wind, the cloud of radioactive material would reach the east coast of Ireland in a number of hours, depending on the speed of the wind. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. 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. This would most immediately affect consumption of fresh milk from cows which had been grazing on contaminated pastures. Douglas Parr, the head scientist at Greenpeace, told RT, "Sellafield is a monument to the huge failings of the British nuclear industry.". Thank you for calling the BT emergency radiation leak reporting centre. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. 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. Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. This is a huge but cramped place: 13,000 people work in a 6 sq km pen surrounded by razor wire. The UKs plans are at an earlier stage. The speedy implementation of basic protective measures in the first hours and the following few days after the event can greatly reduce the exposure of individuals at risk and, therefore, greatly improve the ultimate health outcome for the population. Put a funnel in the neck of a balloon, and hold onto the balloon neck and funnel. But the boxes, for now, are safe. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. All radioactivity is a search for stability. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. But then the pieces were left in the cell. The document ran to 17,000 pages. If you take the cosmic view of Sellafield, the superannuated nuclear facility in north-west England, its story began long before the Earth took shape. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. 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. Other countries also plan to banish their nuclear waste into GDFs. Watch this video ad-free on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/real-life-lore-what-happens-if-yellowstone-blows-up-tomorrowPlease Subscribe: http://bit.ly/2dB7. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. Sellafield Ltd said it was "not a radiological event" but involved a small number of canisters of solvents which had been on the site since 1992. The risk to any individual will be directly related to the degree of exposure. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. Neither of these things are true for BT. Non-commercial publishing (up to A5-size, and in print runs of up to 4000 copies) Non-commercial online use, up to 768 pixels, and for up to 5 years; Please indicate that you accept all terms to proceed Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. At least you can reason with AI. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield Remote submarines have explored and begun cleaning up old storage ponds. In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. 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. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. 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. 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. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. Analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years the 20th century, one of Sellafields tasks! Giant stars ran out of fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed in. Dreams of being a world leader in nuclear waste byproducts halves every years! Equivalent of an 'everything 's okay ' alarm price tag may swell.! The UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run such fuel reprocessed anywhere in world... 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