what happens if sellafield blows up

Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. Douglas Parr, the head scientist at Greenpeace, told RT, "Sellafield is a monument to the huge failings of the British nuclear industry.". A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. Theres no fuel coming in. I dont think its really hit the team just yet.. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. 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. Gas, fuel rods and radioactive equipment were all left in place, in sealed rooms known as cells, which turned so lethal that humans havent entered them since. 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. 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. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. Spent fuel rods and radioactive pieces of metal rest in skips, which in turn are submerged in open, rectangular ponds, where water cools them and absorbs their radiation. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. In some cases, the process of decommissioning and storing nuclear waste is counterintuitively simple, if laborious. But making safe what is left behind is an almost unimaginably expensive and complex task that requires us to think not on a human timescale, but a planetary one. So clearly then, whether the initiating event is accidental or due to some form of terrorist action, the kind of consequences Ireland could suffer are essentially the same - exposure of people some hours later to radiation in the atmosphere. VideoAt the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece, Covid origin likely China lab incident - FBI chief, Blackpink lead top stars back on the road in Asia, Exploring the rigging claims in Nigeria's elections, 'Wales is in England' gaffe sparks TikToker's trip, Ukraine war casts shadow over India's G20 ambitions, Record numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. A healthy person ingests around 1.5 litres of nasal secretions a day, so sniffing and swallowing isn't harmful. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. 1. 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. 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. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. 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. Robots Enter the Race to Save Dying Coral Reefs. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. The plant. A second controlled explosion was then carried out at the same location shortly before 16:00 BST. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. 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. 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. However, using improper technique may cause problem. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. Prominence has been given to the use of iodine tablets as a means of limiting radiation dose. In Indonesia, sickness and pollution plague a sprawling factory complex that supplies the world with crucial battery materials. 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. 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. When the cloud does arrive, there will be no immediate physical ill effects to anybody. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. Structures that will eventually be dismantled piece-by-piece look close to collapse but they cant fall down. 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. But the first consideration clearly has to be health. 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. Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. What's he waiting for? It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. ", 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. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Read about our approach to external linking. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. "Because this is happening on the Sellafield site we exercise extreme caution and . And the waste keeps piling up. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. 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. Several guys were sprayed with acid but no serious injuries.<br /><br />Heard about one that was in a . Many of us put our phones and laptop charging during the night. 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 on a charger and in the car with the hood up. 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. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. 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. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. 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. Avoiding consumption of contaminated food would be another essential element in the response to the emergency. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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. #7. However, many feel worried if it will blow up or overheat as a full charge usually takes 2-3 hours tops. 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. 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. It is in keeping this exposure for each individual to a minimum that simple practical precautions will be absolutely vital. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. 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. 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. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. 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. That would create a mixture of magma, rocks, vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? Sellafield reprocesses and stores nearly all of Britain's nuclear waste, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. "It is urgent that we clean up these ponds [but] it will be decades before they are . Most of the plants at Sellafield, for instance, because of their nature, do not contain radioactive iodine and iodine tablets would, therefore, have no place in the response to a disaster. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. 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. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. 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. 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 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. 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. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. 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This cycle, from acid to powder, lasted up to 36 hours, Dixon said and it hadnt improved a jot in efficiency in the years shed been there. Sellafield Ltd's head of corporate communications, Emma Law, takes you inside Sellafield. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. Non-commercial publishing (up to A5-size, and in print runs of up to 4000 copies) Non-commercial online use, up to 768 pixels, and for up to 5 years; Please indicate that you accept all terms to proceed The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. The ceiling for now is 53bn. 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. After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. 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 was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. Tablets containing non-radioactive iodine, taken just before or at an early stage of exposure, are effective in blocking the uptake of radioactive iodine by the thyroid gland and thereby greatly reducing the risk of thyroid cancer in subsequent years. Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. But the flask, a few scratches and dents aside, stayed intact. 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. 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. On April 20, 2005 Sellafield workers found a huge leak at Thorp, which first started in July 2004. It all put me in mind of a man whod made a house of ice in deepest winter but now senses spring around the corner, and must move his furniture out before it all melts and collapses around him. As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. An anonymous whistleblower who used to be a senior manager at Sellafield told the broadcasters Panorama programme that he worried about the safety of the site every day. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. 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. 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. Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. Neither of these things are true for BT. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. 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. The video is spectacular. 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. 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