Can Sellafield be bombed? 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. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. 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. 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. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? 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 . 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. 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. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. McManus suffered, too. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. 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. These people have pontificated about bringing the stuff in from outside systems and that would give the kids leukaemia. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. But then the pieces were left in the cell. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. 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. As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. 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. 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. But, the book suggests, its sheer physical isolation may have been responsible for some of the deep fears that people have of nuclear power. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. 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 spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. Now it needs to clean-up. But in the atoms of some elements like uranium or plutonium, protons and neutrons are crammed into their nuclei in ways that make them unsteady make them radioactive. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. "He was standing there putting water in and if things had gone wrong with the water it had never been tried before on a reactor fire if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. 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. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. It would have been like Chernobyl there was contamination everywhere, on the golf course, in the milk, in chickens but it was quickly forgotten about," says McManus. Sellafields waste spent fuel rods, scraps of metal, radioactive liquids, a miscellany of other debris is parked in concrete silos, artificial ponds and sealed buildings. She meets aunts and cousins on her shifts all the time. 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. Video, 00:01:03Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Up Next. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. Video, 00:05:44Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, One-minute World News. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. 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. It was a historic occasion. It will be finished a century or so from now. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. I kept being told, at Sellafield, that science is still trying to rectify the decisions made in undue haste three-quarters of a century ago. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. What If Betelgeuse Exploded Right Now? Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. What is radioactive waste management? They told me I had a lung burden and that was an accumulation from the 30-odd years I'd worked at Sellafield. 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. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. 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. 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. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. 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. And that put the frighteners on us because we had small children. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. 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. 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. Video, 00:00:19Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. 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. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. Security researchers are jailbreaking large language models to get around safety rules. A drive around the perimeter takes 40 minutes. 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. 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. He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. Now its operators are in a race against time to make the most dangerous areas safe. This has been corrected. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. 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. Can you visit Sizewell B? 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. 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. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. And the waste keeps piling up. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. 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. The sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. 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. 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. Management, profligate with money, was criminally careless with safety and ecology. It was useless with people, too. Video, 00:01:13, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. They dont know exactly what theyll find in the silos and ponds. This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. The rods arrived at Sellafield by train, stored in cuboid flasks with corrugated sides, each weighing about 50 tonnes and standing 1.5 metres tall. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. . "You kept quiet. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. As well as being filled with waste during the early years of the nuclear age, Sellafields ponds were also overwhelmed with spent fuel during the 1974 miners strike. The UKs plans are at an earlier stage. It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. The process will cost at least 121bn. 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. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? But the flask, a few scratches and dents aside, stayed intact. The plant has changed. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. Barrels containing high-level radioactive nuclear waste stored in a pool at Sellafield, in 2002. ike malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. And here, over roughly 20m years, the uranium and other bits of space dust and debris cohered to form our planet in such a way that the violent tectonics of the young Earth pushed the uranium not towards its hot core but up into the folds of its crust. It was just bonkers," says Alan Postlethwaite, the truculentvicar of Seascale, who was accused of being a crypto-communist for even thinking the plant might be linked to cancers. 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. I'm not sure if this would be fatal but it's not good. Sellafield Ltd said in a statement: "During a routine inspection of chemical substances stored on the Sellafield site, a small amount of chemicals (organic peroxide) were identified as requiring . Things could get much worse. These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. For the next decade, it was central to the UK's nuclear weapons programme, before it was taken over by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in 1954. 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. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. The total amount released from Chernobyl was 27 kilograms, almost 100 times less than the potential release from the facility at Sellafield. 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. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. A 2,000-mile high pillar of cloud has formed on Saturn and scientists believe the planet may explode in the near future. On the other hand, high-level waste the byproduct of reprocessing is so radioactive that its containers will give off heat for thousands of years. Now I look back and think, no, we caused that," says McManus. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. 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. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. Its an existential threat to link-in-bio companies. So itll float down to the bottom of the pond, pick up a nuclear rod that has fallen out of a skip, and put it back into the skip. Sometimes, though, a human touch is required. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. 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. Well, from the interviews with Raaz, Reed and former Sellafield boss Barry Snelson, there isn't any. Their further degradation is a sure thing. In Sellafield, these nuclear divers will put on radiation-proof wetsuits and tidy up the pond floor, reaching the places where robotic arms cannot go. The solution, for now, is vitrification. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. 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. 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. Every month one of 13 easy-to-access boxes is lifted onto a platform and inspected on all sides for signs of damage and leakage. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the early years of the nuclear age. Everyone in West Cumbria has a relationship with Sellafield. Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. 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 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. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. NASA . The day before I met Dixon, technicians had fed one final batch of spent fuel into acid and that was that, the end of reprocessing. "I often think there will have been a Seascale cluster of leukaemia because that's where the fallout from the big chimneys was closest. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. A super-massive black hole couldn't explode. Six decades after Britain's worst nuclear accident, an oral history of Sellafield reveals what it felt like to live near the plant, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. 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. The future is rosy. Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. 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. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. Correction: we mixed up the Sun's lifespan with its age. Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. 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. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. On one floor, we stopped to look at a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV a steamer trunk-sized thing with a yellow carapace, floating in the algal-green water. 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. Seven rare cancers were found in the small Seascale community between 1955 and 1983, yet the authorities "proved" this was due to the natural movement of people. Accidents had to be modelled. We power-walked past nonetheless. An emergency could occur following a fire, explosion, seismic event or serious leak in one of the areas handling radioactive materials at the Sellafield Site. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. There are a few reasons why they detonate before hitting the target: one, an 'air burst' renders more damage over a larger area without actually hitting anything. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. 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. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. 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 salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. 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. "What aroused my anxieties was within 12 or 18 months I conducted the funerals of thee children who died of leukaemia. 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. 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. Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Western Europe, reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, splitting it into plutonium, uranium and waste. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. 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. 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. 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. Meta is finally allowing people to add more links to their Instagram profiles. 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. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. 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. He was right, but only in theory. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. 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. 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 . (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) This was Britain's worst-ever nuclear accident, but no one was evacuated, no iodine pills were distributed, work went on and most people were not even told about thefire. 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. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing.
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