The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. 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.
What If the Sun Exploded Tomorrow? - YouTube 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. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. This is what creates a Type II supernova: the core-collapse of an ultra-massive star. Correction: we mixed up the Sun's lifespan with its age. 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. 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. Can Sellafield be bombed? Waste can travel incognito, to fatal effect: radioactive atoms carried by the wind or water, entering living bodies, riddling them with cancer, ruining them inside out. 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.
Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. No. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. 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. Anywhere downwind of Sellafield during the releases would be rendered uninhabitable probably for generations and people caught in the fall-out would have a greatly increased chance of getting cancer.
Sellafield nuclear site evacuated and bomb squad called to explosive Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Conditions inside the Shear Cave are intense: all operations are carried out remotely using robots, with the waste producing 280 sieverts of radiation per hour - more than 60 times the deadly dose. The site currently handles nearly all the radioactive waste generated by the UKs 15 operational nuclear reactors. Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. Can you visit Sizewell B? Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. What would happen if Sellafield exploded?
Is Hinkley Point closing? - TimesMojo 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. 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. McManus suffered, too. 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. 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 . No one had figured out yet how to remove them. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. These people have pontificated about bringing the stuff in from outside systems and that would give the kids leukaemia. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. 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. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? ", 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. Logged. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. Cumbria has long been suggested as a potential site for the UKs first, long-term underground nuclear waste storage facility - a process known as geological disposal. The total amount released from Chernobyl was 27 kilograms, almost 100 times less than the potential release from the facility at Sellafield. 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. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. 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. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. 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. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. 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. 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. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. As the nation's priorities shifted,. 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. . 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. I was a non-desirable person on site.". Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. It would have . This is what will happen when Trump is arrested. What If 7.16M subscribers 1.9M views 3 years ago #Betelgeuse At about 950 times bigger than our Sun, Betelgeuse is one of the biggest stars in our Universe.. Sellafield Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA. As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. And so they must be maintained and kept standing. And thats the least zany thing about it. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. 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 bad news from the new management? Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. It thought nothing of trying to block Wastwater lake to get more water or trying to mine the national park for a waste dump. 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. It has its own railway station and, until September 11, 2001, its visitor centre was a major tourist attraction visited by an average of 1,000 people per day. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond.
Sellafield What to do in a radiation emergency booklet - Cumbria 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. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, lived nearby or whose lives havebeen linked to the vast WestCumbrian nuclear complex, we know more now about how people really reacted. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. 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. 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. At one spot, our trackers went mad. 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.
Sellafield nuclear disaster would spread across Cumbria - new map shows What Caused the Challenger Disaster? - History Now its operators are in a race against time to make the most dangerous areas safe. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. 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. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. Those who were working there didn't want to be seen against the thing," says Mary Johnson, now in her 90s, who was bornon the farm that was compulsorily purchased to become the site of Sellafield. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. All rights reserved. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. They told me I had a lung burden and that was an accumulation from the 30-odd years I'd worked at Sellafield. 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. It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. 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. Where the waste goes next is controversial. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. 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. 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. 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. Video, 00:00:49, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. Still, it has lasted almost the entirety of the atomic age, witnessing both its earliest follies and its continuing confusions. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. He was right, but only in theory. 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. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. 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. The popular centre, operated by BNFL, was officially opened in 1988 by Prince Philip and went on to become one of West Cumbria's biggest tourist attractions. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. One retired worker, who now lives in nearby Seascale, thought there might be a dropped fuel rod in one of the glove boxes a rumour that turned out to be false. 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. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. 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. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. Working 10-hour days, four days a week in air-fed suits, staff are tasked with cleaning every speck of dust and dirt until the room has been fully decontaminated. Now it needs to clean-up. 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. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, . The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. 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. 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. 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. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss.
Terror attack on Sellafield 'would wipe out the north' - The Guardian New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. Dr Thompson said that the buildings designed in the 1950s could not withstand a crash from an airliner. 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 . 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. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. Just like in 1957. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. If you lived on a certain street, you were of a certain status within the works. 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 . Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. On April 20, 2005 Sellafield workers found a huge leak at Thorp, which first started in July 2004. Game adaptations after him will have to try harder. At first scientists believed that the fog near Saturn was coming from Saturn's moon, Titan, but on closer examination it appears that Saturn is undergoing a cataclysm and it could destroy itself in the next ten months. 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. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. 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. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. In January 2015, the government sacked the private consortium that had been running the Sellafield site since 2008. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. Video, 00:01:07, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. Mario was too iconic to fail. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. 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. 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.
What happened to Fiddlers Ferry power station? - TimesMojo 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. This was lucrative work. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. At present the pool can hold 5.5 tonnes of advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) fuel, soon it will be able to hold 7.5 tonnes. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. 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. This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. "I often think there will have been a Seascale cluster of leukaemia because that's where the fallout from the big chimneys was closest. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. This is Sellafields great quandary. 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. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. That forecast has aged poorly. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Seagulls chatter, the hum of machinery is constant, a pipe zig-zagging across the ground vents steam. 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. 6 Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. 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. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess.
Sellafield chemical find prompts bomb squad visit - BBC News The plant has changed. 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. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. 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. These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. Read about our approach to external linking. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. The two liquids mixed and exploded, destroying the orbiter with it. She meets aunts and cousins on her shifts all the time. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. 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. New clinical trials could more effectively reach solutions. But, the book suggests, its sheer physical isolation may have been responsible for some of the deep fears that people have of nuclear power. 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.