These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. Video, 00:01:13, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. 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 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. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. Video, 00:01:15Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. An anonymous whistleblower who used to be a senior manager at Sellafield told the broadcasters Panorama programme that he worried about the safety of the site every day. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. I only ever saw a dummy of a spent fuel rod; the real thing would have been a metre long, weighed 10-12kg, and, when it emerged from a reactor, run to temperatures of 2,800C, half as hot as the surface of the sun. 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, the book suggests, its sheer physical isolation may have been responsible for some of the deep fears that people have of nuclear power. These people have pontificated about bringing the stuff in from outside systems and that would give the kids leukaemia. New clinical trials could more effectively reach solutions. 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. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. 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. 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. The nuclear industry certainly knew about the utility of water, steel and concrete as shields against radioactivity, and by the 1970s, the US government had begun considering burying reactor waste in a GDF. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. 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. 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. We power-walked past nonetheless. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. Video, 00:01:15, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. Perhaps, the study suggested, the leukaemia had an undetected, infectious cause. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. 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 short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. Video, 00:00:28Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. The video is spectacular. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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. Game adaptations after him will have to try harder. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. 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. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. When all else had failed to stop the fire, Tuohy, a chemist, now dead, scaled the reactor building, took a full blast of the radiation and stared into the blaze below. 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. 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. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. Video, 00:00:49, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. 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. The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Any time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. Of course the sun is only about 4.6 billion years old, half way through its lifespan of about 10 bil. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. If the geology is simple, and were disposing of just high- and intermediate-level waste, then were thinking 20bn, said Jonathan Turner, a geologist with Nuclear Waste Services. The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation.". Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. Read about our approach to external linking. Can you visit Sizewell B? It marked Sellafields transition from an operational facility to a depot devoted purely to storage and containment. 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. This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. 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. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. It will be finished a century or so from now. 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 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. The reprocessing plants end was always coming. Video, 00:00:35Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. Video, 00:01:03Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Up Next. 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. Video, 00:01:13Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. 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. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. 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. McManus suffered, too. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. 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. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. 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. Don't get me wrong. 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. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. 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. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. However, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday that a "quick response" procedure was in place to cover the whole of the country in the event of a hijack attack. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. 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. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. The sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in. Most of the atoms in our daily lives the carbon in the wood of a desk, the oxygen in the air, the silicon in window glass have stable nuclei. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. The nuclear industry certainly knew about the utility of water, steel and concrete as shields against radioactivity, and by the 1970s, the US government had begun considering burying reactor waste in a GDF. My relationship began at 13 when I went to school at St Bees, just three miles away. Everyone in West Cumbria has a relationship with Sellafield. 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. 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. 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 5million attraction operated for 20 years and will now be demolished this month. This is what creates a Type II supernova: the core-collapse of an ultra-massive star. 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. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. 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. 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. I was a radiation leper. 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. 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 document ran to 17,000 pages. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. What happens if Sellafield is bombed? These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) 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. Then, having driven through a high-security gate, youre surrounded by towering chimneys, pipework, chugging cooling plants, everything dressed in steampunk. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. But some folk could laugh it off. 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. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. 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. if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. In the water, the skips full of used fuel rods were sometimes stacked three deep, and when one was placed in or pulled out, rods tended to tumble out on to the floor of the pond. 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. During this process, some of the uranium atoms, randomly but very usefully, absorb darting neutrons, yielding heavier atoms of plutonium: the stuff of nuclear weapons. 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. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. Workers at Sellafield, reporting their alarming radiation exposure to their managers, were persuaded that theyd walk [it] off on the way home, the Daily Mirror reported at the time. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. ", 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. 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. Accidents had to be modelled. Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. Instead of bumbling, British, gung ho pioneers, Sellafield is now run by corporate PR folk and slick American businessmen. Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. 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. . In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. 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. A pipe on the outside of a building had cracked, and staff had planted 10ft-tall sheets of lead into the ground around it to shield people from the radiation. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. Weve got folks here who joined at 18 and have been here more than 40 years, working only in this building, said Lisa Dixon, an operations manager. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. The buckets are then fed through an enclosed hole in the wall to a waiting RAPTOR master-slave robot arm encased in a box made of steel and 12mm reinforced glass.