Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. "It's not fancy technology, it's not somebody from Oxford that's come up with this, says Richard Edmondson, operations manager at Sellafield, standing beside a looming stack of the concrete monoliths. Seagulls chatter, the hum of machinery is constant, a pipe zig-zagging across the ground vents steam. The only hint of what each box contains is a short serial number stamped on one side that can only be decoded using a formula held at three separate locations and printed on vellum. 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. Theres no fuel coming in. I dont think its really hit the team just yet.. 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. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. 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. 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. The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. A healthy person ingests around 1.5 litres of nasal secretions a day, so sniffing and swallowing isn't harmful. 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. But then the pieces were left in the cell. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Accidents had to be modelled. 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. 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. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. 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. 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. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. 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. Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. This was lucrative work. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. At one spot, our trackers went mad. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. 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. 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. 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. The institute's scrutiny will focus on whether a large. 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. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. Since September 11th, public concern in Ireland about Sellafield has taken on the added dimension of fear of a terrorist attack on the plant. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. 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. 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. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. Here is the deal. 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. May 11, 2005. 5. 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. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb waits for the bus. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. Assuming you're using good technique in blowing up your balloons, the only thing likely to happen is that you'll get better at it. What would happen if the entire world launched nukes at the US at the same time? Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. 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. Voice and data communications go into an unprecedented fury as NORAD attempts to verify inbound nuclear missiles 4. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. 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. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. It wasnt. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. 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 the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. "It is urgent that we clean up these ponds [but] it will be decades before they are . You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. 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. However, using improper technique may cause problem. Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. Prominence has been given to the use of iodine tablets as a means of limiting radiation dose. The considerable numbers of thyroid cancers in children in Belarus and Ukraine following the Chernobyl accident are likely to have been due not alone to the lack of iodine tablets but also to the unrestricted consumption of contaminated food in the immediate aftermath of the accident. Those neutrons generate more neutrons out of uranium atoms, which generate still more neutrons out of other uranium atoms, and so on, the whole process begetting vast quantities of heat that can turn water into steam and drive turbines. 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. This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. f you take the cosmic view of Sellafield, the superannuated nuclear facility in north-west England, its story began long before the Earth took shape. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. Sellafield's presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. Many of us put our phones and laptop charging during the night. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that there is the world of difference between being at, or very close to, the site of a major nuclear disaster and being 100 miles away, as the nearest point in this country is from Sellafield; or even 60 miles away as we are from Wylfa nuclear power station in north Wales, which is the nuclear installation nearest to Ireland. Robots Enter the Race to Save Dying Coral Reefs. This is about self-regulation and responsibility. 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. Lets go home, Dixon said. However, many feel worried if it will blow up or overheat as a full charge usually takes 2-3 hours tops. But the boxes, for now, are safe. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. An area of the site was cordoned off for most of the day, and the canisters disposed of by controlled explosion. Questions 1, 2 and 3 are probably in my top 10 of most frequently asked questions. Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. 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. 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. Thank you for calling the BT emergency radiation leak reporting centre. 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. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. It was on a charger and in the car with the hood up. 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. OEMs have made sure that those batteries are not overcharged even if kept for long. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. Once uranium and plutonium were extracted from used fuel rods, it was thought, they could be stored safely and perhaps eventually resold, to make money on the side. This is Sellafields great quandary. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. The Baking Soda Balloon Blow-Up Experiment. 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. 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. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. 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. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. 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. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. A recent investigation by the BBC found a catalogue of safety concerns including insufficient staffing numbers to operate safely and an allegation that radioactive materials were stored in degrading plastic bottles. 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. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. 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. 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 UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. However, there were concerns they could become hazardous if exposed to oxygen. 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. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. But Teller was glossing over the details, namely: the expense of keeping waste safe, the duration over which it has to be maintained, the accidents that could befall it, the fallout of those accidents. 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