In Taryl's final installment of 2020's Halloween how-to series, we bring you "The Glob". Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. Please stay on the line. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. 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. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. If new nuclear does go ahead in the UK then the technology will be French, Japanese or American. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. 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. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. At least you can reason with AI. 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. 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. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. 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. Atomic weapons are highly complex, surprisingly sensitive, and often pretty old. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. Accidents had to be modelled. Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. They dont know exactly what theyll find in the silos and ponds. A B&Q humidity meter sits on the wall of the near-dark warehouse, installed when the boxes were first moved here to check if humidity would be an issue for storage. 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 . Heat Pumps Sell Like Hotcakes on America's Oil-Rich Frontier. 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, Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. 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. After its fat, six-metre-long body slinks out of its cage-like housing, it can rear up in serpentine fashion, as if scanning its surroundings for prey. 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. 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. The waste, a mix of graphite, bricks, tubing and reams of metalwork so-called low and intermediate-level radioactive waste was then loaded into 121 concrete blocks and sealed using a grout mix of concrete and steel. Or how the site evolved from a farm to a nuclear icon and one of the biggest environmental clean-up challenges in Europe? 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. 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. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? 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. 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. Sellafield took its present name only in 1981, in part to erase the old name, Windscale, and the associated memories of the fire. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. Standing in the oldest part of the Sellafield site, the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo has stored nuclear waste in its water-filled chambers for the last 60 years. The site currently handles nearly all the radioactive waste generated by the UKs 15 operational nuclear reactors. Feb 22, 2023. Responding to worries about how robust these containers were, the government, in 1984, arranged to have a speeding train collide head-on with a flask. 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. It was a historic occasion. 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. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. Within minutes of arriving by train at the tiny, windswept Sellafield train station the photographer I visited the site with was met by armed police. 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 video is spectacular. 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. Photo: Twitter. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. 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. We ducked through half-constructed corridors and emerged into the main, as-yet-roofless hall. Both buildings, for the most part, remain standing to this day. 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. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. The leaked liquid was estimated to contain 20 metric tons of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle, Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) 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. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. Sellafield Ltd's head of corporate communications, Emma Law, takes you inside Sellafield. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. 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? One moment you're passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. How high will the sea rise? In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. Workers Are Dying in the EV Industrys Tainted City. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Since September 11th, public concern in Ireland about Sellafield has taken on the added dimension of fear of a terrorist attack on the plant. 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. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. The hot, compressed oxygen explodes in a runaway . Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. The speedy implementation of basic protective measures in the first hours and the following few days after the event can greatly reduce the exposure of individuals at risk and, therefore, greatly improve the ultimate health outcome for the population. Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. Once radiation arrives, the national network of radiation monitoring stations, supplemented by mobile monitoring units of the Defence Forces and Civil Defence, will enable movement of the radiation cloud to be tracked and radiation levels in each area to be quantified. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. Other remote machines are being used to take cameras deep inside decaying. The reprocessing plants end was always coming. 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. 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. 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. The programme painted a negative picture of safety that we do not recognise, the statement continued. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. However, there were concerns they could become hazardous if exposed to oxygen. 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. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. At its heart is a giant pond full of radioactive . There are more than 1,000 nuclear facilities. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. 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. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. The sites reprocessing contracts are due to expire in four years but clean-up may take more than 100 years and cost up to 162 billion. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. 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 Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom's history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. 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. This would most immediately affect consumption of fresh milk from cows which had been grazing on contaminated pastures. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). But the first consideration clearly has to be health. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. Towards the end of the play, Biff attempts to expose Willy to the reality of . A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. 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. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. 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. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. But the boxes, for now, are safe. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. 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. At one spot, our trackers went mad. Sellafield Ltd said it was "not a radiological event" but involved a small number of canisters of solvents which had been on the site since 1992. 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. In certain other circumstances, their availability could, of course, be very important. Then it generated electricity for the National Grid, until 2003. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. The solution, for now, is vitrification. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. 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. In January 2015, the government sacked the private consortium that had been running the Sellafield site since 2008. 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. Read about our approach to external linking. So it was like: OK, thats it? The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. Then, having driven through a high-security gate, youre surrounded by towering chimneys, pipework, chugging cooling plants, everything dressed in steampunk. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. How will the rock bear up if, in the next ice age, tens of thousands of years from today, a kilometre or two of ice forms on the surface? 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. Neither of these things are true for BT. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. For six weeks, Sellafields engineers prepared for the task, rehearsing on a 3D model, ventilating the cell, setting up a stream of air to blow away the molten metal, ensuring that nothing caught fire from the lasers sparks. 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. In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. All radioactivity is a search for stability. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. 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. Their further degradation is a sure thing. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. This is Sellafields great quandary. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. Then, having. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. 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. It said a team from the army's Explosives Ordinance Disposal Team disposed of the chemicals by digging a trench, burying them using sandbags and detonating them in a controlled manner. 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. Within reach, so to speak, of the humans who eventually came along circa 300,000BC, and who mined the uranium beginning in the 1500s, learned about its radioactivity in 1896 and started feeding it into their nuclear reactors 70-odd years ago, making electricity that could be relayed to their houses to run toasters and light up Christmas trees. About 9,000 people are employed at the Sellafield site The estimated cost of cleaning up the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria has risen by almost 2.5bn in a year, a report has. "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Where the waste goes next is controversial. 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. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. Iodine tablets, however, are relevant only to circumstances where radioactive iodine is present and this is not always the case. 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. In Alaska, people are flocking to buy electric appliances instead of fuel-guzzling furnaces, as oil prices soar and temperatures plummet. What could possibly go wrong indeed. Effective restrictions on supply of such milk or other affected foods would have to be put in place. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. 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. This was the Windscale fire which occurred when uranium metal fuel ignited inside Windscale Pile no.1. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. Advice, based on knowledge of the radiation levels in a particular area, will be issued on local and national radio as to when it is most important to remain inside, and for how long. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. Then it is vitrified: mixed with three parts glass beads and a little sugar, until it turns into a hot block of dirty-brown glass. But the flask, a few scratches and dents aside, stayed intact. The government is paying private companies 1.7bn a year to decommission ageing buildings at Sellafield. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd now claims to have carried out an analysis which shows that such an attack would not necessarily have severe effects on Ireland. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. 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. 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. Question 4 is what I consider the 'ultimate goal + worst-case scenario' an artist could think of. 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. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. OEMs have made sure that those batteries are not overcharged even if kept for long. 1. 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. When records couldnt be found, Sellafield staff conducted interviews with former employees. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. At such a distance there is, of course, no possibility of any heat or blast effect, indeed no immediate effect of any kind. This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafields chief tasks was reprocessing. Bomb disposal experts were called to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant after a routine audit of chemicals stored in a laboratory. Advertisement. He was right, but only in theory. In 1947, the Sellafield site opened with a single mission - the production of plutonium, a radioactive chemical element for use in Britain's nuclear deterrent. Have your child pours in enough baking soda to fill the balloon halfway. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. 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