what happens if sellafield blows up

Go 'beyond the nutshell' at https://brilliant.org/nutshell by diving deeper into these topics and more with 20% off an annual subscription!This video was spo. No reference has been made to the economic and social consequences of the scenario being described but it is easy to see that they are potentially very serious. An area of the site was cordoned off for most of the day, and the canisters disposed of by controlled explosion. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. 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. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good maintenance and simulations to trust their weapons work. The process of getting suited up and into the room takes so much time that workers only spend around 90 minutes a day in contaminated areas. But the first consideration clearly has to be health. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. 2023 BBC. Iodine tablets, however, are relevant only to circumstances where radioactive iodine is present and this is not always the case. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. As the nation's priorities shifted,. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. 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. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. 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. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. 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. The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. 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. 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. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. 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. A campaign to get public officials in the Cleveland area to attempt a week without driving didn't get many electeds to go totally car-free but it did make a powerful statement about automobile dependency that could spur change and inspire other activists to issue . The snakes face is the size and shape of a small dinner plate, with a mouth through which it fires a fierce, purple shaft of light. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. Feb 22, 2023. But who wants nuclear waste buried in their backyard? In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. But. Put a funnel in the neck of a balloon, and hold onto the balloon neck and funnel. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. Eventually, the plant will be taller than Westminster Abbey and as part of the decommissioning process, this structure too will be torn down once it has finished its task, decades from now. The most important thing people can do to minimise their exposure in the initial period will be to stay indoors. The air was pure Baltic brine. 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. The best way to neutralise its threat is to move it into a subterranean vault, of the kind the UK plans to build later this century. Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. 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. If the Yellowstone supervolcano were to erupt, it would happen like this: Heat rising from deep within the planet's core would begin to melt the molten rock just below the ground's surface. The GDF will effectively entomb not just decades of nuclear waste but also the decades-old idea that atomic energy will be both easy and cheap the very idea that drove the creation of Sellafield, where the worlds earliest nuclear aspirations began. 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. 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. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity too cheap to meter. Advertisement. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. Near Sellafield, radioactive iodine found its way into the grass of the meadows where dairy cows grazed, so that samples of milk taken in the weeks after the fire showed 10 times the permissible level. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. "That should help us remove more of the radioactivity early on, so that we can get on with the . Overseas reprocessing contracts signed since 1976 require that this vitrified waste is returned to the country of origin, meaning Sellafield now only has responsibility for storing the UKs vitrified waste. It is these two sites, known as First Generation Magnox Storage Pond and the Magnox Swarf Storage Silos, that are referred to as the most hazardous in Western Europe. Hinkley Point C, the first new nuclear plant in a generation, is being built in Somerset, but its cost has bloated to more than 25bn. Sellafield said in a statement: "These chemicals are used extensively in many industries and are well understood. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. 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. But then the pieces were left in the cell. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. First, would the effects of a terrorist attack be worse than an accident? A healthy person ingests around 1.5 litres of nasal secretions a day, so sniffing and swallowing isn't harmful. Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. Read about our approach to external linking. Once sufficiently cooled, the spent fuel is moved by canal to Sellafields Head End Shear Cave where it is chopped up, dropped into a basket and dissolved in nitric acid. 5. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. At least you can reason with AI. What happens when the battery is fully charged but still connected? It was a historic occasion. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. Prominence has been given to the use of iodine tablets as a means of limiting radiation dose. If you are on the receiving end of someone's blow-up, you want to not feed the fire by getting angry yourself, but instead remaining calm. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. Bomb disposal experts were called to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant after a routine audit of chemicals stored in a laboratory. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. I leased a beat and the song blew up, but some other artist has the exclusive rights. 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. Environment Agency earlier said it was aware of the situation and was working with partners to monitor it. 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. Atomic weapons are highly complex, surprisingly sensitive, and often pretty old. 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. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. 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 has been called the most dangerous place in the UK, the most hazardous place in Europe and the world's riskiest nuclear waste site. For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. Again, things are thrown out of balance, but this time, when the star collapses, it falls in on a core of volatile oxygen, rather than iron. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. Biologists are working to quickly grow hardier specimens that can be propagated and transplanted by robotic arms. Other countries also plan to banish their nuclear waste into GDFs. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. 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. From an operational nuclear facility, Sellafield turned into a full-time storage depot but an uncanny, precarious one, filled with toxic nuclear waste that has to be kept contained at any cost. The lab operated in the 1970s and produced the Plutonium-238 used in early cardiac pacemakers and as a primary fuel source for Nasas deep space missions where solar energy isnt available. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. 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. May 11, 2005. 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. Multiple simultaneous launches are detected 2. 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. Fifteen years after the New Mexico site opened, a drum of waste burst open, leaking radiation up an exhaust shaft and then for a kilometre or so above ground. One heckofa bang, blew the hood off the car and there was a cloud of vapor. Everybodys thinking: What do we do? Sellafield's Magnox plant will stop reprocessing in July 2022 and enter a new era of clean-up and decommissioning. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. That would create a mixture of magma, rocks, vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases. 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 sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in the stars cores, turning lighter elements like iron into heavier ones like uranium. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. 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. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. If Onkalo begins operating on schedule, in 2025, it will be the worlds first GDF for spent fuel and high-level reactor waste 6,500 tonnes of the stuff, all from Finnish nuclear stations. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? Rebel skirmishes, global politics, and a caustic atmosphere are just some of the obstacles in Christopher Horsleys mission to capture life-saving visuals. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. The institute's scrutiny will focus on whether a large. 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, Sizewell C nuclear plant confirmed with 700m public stake, Ineos in talks with Rolls-Royce on mini-nuclear power plant technology. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. "Because this is happening on the Sellafield site we exercise extreme caution and . It wasnt. 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. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. But it is of over-riding importance to appreciate that the health consequences would be solely long-term, and, most importantly, that a tightly organised response, as is provided for under the Emergency Plan for Nuclear Accidents, can be highly effective in keeping these consequences to a minimum. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. VideoRecord numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. 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