What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. 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. The outside of the container is decontaminated before it is moved to Sellafields huge vitrified product store, an air-cooled facility currently home to 6,000 containers. Question 4 is what I consider the 'ultimate goal + worst-case scenario' an artist could think of. 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. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. "It is urgent that we clean up these ponds [but] it will be decades before they are . The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. 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. This would most immediately affect consumption of fresh milk from cows which had been grazing on contaminated pastures. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. 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. Sellafield was the site in 1957 of one of the world's worst nuclear incidents. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. 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. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. Many of us put our phones and laptop charging during the night. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. In a plan to respond to this situation, the key element will be skill in determining from weather data and data from the affected plant: how long the cloud will take to reach Ireland; how severe will radiation levels be when the cloud arrives; what places will be affected and for how long. Sellafield Ltd's head of corporate communications, Emma Law, takes you inside Sellafield. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. The prevailing wind being south-westerly, we might hope that this material would be blown away from us, rather than towards us. Last year, BBC's Panorama exposed safety concerns at the plant after a tip-off from a whistleblower, including allegations of inadequate staffing levels and poor maintenance. Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. But the first consideration clearly has to be health. 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. 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. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. 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. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. She meets aunts and cousins on her shifts all the time. Launches are confirmed and verified. The risk to any individual will be directly related to the degree of exposure. 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. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. 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. Thank you for calling the BT emergency radiation leak reporting centre. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield Remote submarines have explored and begun cleaning up old storage ponds. 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. Still, it has lasted almost the entirety of the atomic age, witnessing both its earliest follies and its continuing confusions. This is Sellafields great quandary. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. 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. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. Dr Tom O'Flaherty is chief executive of the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland and a member of the Government's Emergency Planning Task Force, Growing chants that all wars come to an end and negotiations must begin feeds Putins hopes the West will crumble, What is the DUP up to now? Workers Are Dying in the EV Industrys Tainted City. We ducked through half-constructed corridors and emerged into the main, as-yet-roofless hall. As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. Have you ever wondered what happens behind Sellafield's security fences? 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. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. In certain other circumstances, their availability could, of course, be very important. Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo 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. 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 also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. It turned out that if you werent looking to make plutonium nukes to blow up cities, Magnox was a pretty inefficient way to light up homes and power factories. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. 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 waste comes in on rails. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. It was a historic occasion. The document ran to 17,000 pages. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. ", 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. It is vital that it be brought home to every member of the public that this would not be the case. Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste. The Mountain Village in the Path of Indias Electric Dreams. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. 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. 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. In a factory on the outskirts of Glasgow, aerospace manufacturer Skyrora is building rockets for a space-bound taxi service for satellites. 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. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. DeSantis won't say he's running. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. 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. 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. I still get lost sometimes here, said Sanna Mustonen, a geologist with Posiva, even after all these years. After Onkalo takes in all its waste, these caverns will be sealed up to the surface with bentonite, a kind of clay that absorbs water, and that is often found in cat litter. 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. 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. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? Once in the facility, the lid bolts on the flasks are removed and the fuel is lowered into a small pool of water and taken out of the flask. 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. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. 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. At one spot, our trackers went mad. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. One moment you're passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. When they arrived over the years, during the heyday of reprocessing, the skips were unloaded into pools so haphazardly that Sellafield is now having to build an underwater map of what is where, just to know best how to get it all out. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. 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. 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. At its heart is a giant pond full of radioactive . In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. At a conference in Drogheda at the weekend, BNFL invited the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland to review the analysis, and we will be taking up this invitation without delay. 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. 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. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. 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 they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. Video, Record numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story, BBC's Panorama exposed safety concerns at the plant, Prince Andrew offered Frogmore Cottage - reports, Beer and wine sales in Canada fall to all-time low, Bieber cancels remaining Justice world tour dates, Trump lashes out at Murdoch over vote fraud case, Man survives 31 days in jungle by eating worms, Eli Lilly caps monthly insulin costs in US at $35, Ed Sheeran says wife developed tumour in pregnancy, China and Belarus call for peace in Ukraine. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) 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 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. Watch this video ad-free on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/real-life-lore-what-happens-if-yellowstone-blows-up-tomorrowPlease Subscribe: http://bit.ly/2dB7. An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. Read about our approach to external linking. 5. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. 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. Saw one explode from across the street. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. 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