Still, it has lasted almost the entirety of the atomic age, witnessing both its earliest follies and its continuing confusions. "That should help us remove more of the radioactivity early on, so that we can get on with the . It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. 2023 BBC. He was right, but only in theory. Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. 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. 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. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. We sweltered even before we put on heavy boots and overalls to visit the reprocessing plant, where, until the previous day, technicians had culled uranium and plutonium out of spent fuel. I leased a beat and the song blew up, but some other artist has the exclusive rights. 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. 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 involving these plants. Heat Pumps Sell Like Hotcakes on America's Oil-Rich Frontier. The best way to neutralise its threat is to move it into a subterranean vault, of the kind the UK plans to build later this century. 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 . Before leaving every building, we ran Geiger counters over ourselves always remembering to scan the tops of our heads and the soles of our feet and these clacked like rattlesnakes. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt . At present the pool can hold 5.5 tonnes of advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) fuel, soon it will be able to hold 7.5 tonnes. 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 Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. If new nuclear does go ahead in the UK then the technology will be French, Japanese or American. 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. Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. 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. At its heart is a giant pond full of radioactive . Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. This was lucrative work. Sellafield currently costs the UK taxpayer 1.9 billion a year to run. If you take the cosmic view of Sellafield, the superannuated nuclear facility in north-west England, its story began long before the Earth took shape. 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. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. This has been corrected. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. I stood there for a while, transfixed by the sight of a building going up even as its demolition was already foretold, feeling the water-filled coolness of the fresh, metre-thick concrete walls, and trying to imagine the distant, dreamy future in which all of Sellafield would be returned to fields and meadows again. So it was like: OK, thats it? After a failed attempt to ask Mr. Oliver for a business loan, Biff steals Mr. Oliver's fountain pen from his desk. Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. We must assume, however, that we might not be so lucky. 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. 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. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. 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. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. 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. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. 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. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. Other remote machines are being used to take cameras deep inside decaying. And it is intelligent. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. How high will the sea rise? It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. Multiple simultaneous launches are detected 2. What would happen if the entire world launched nukes at the US at the same time? 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. 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. But then the pieces were left in the cell. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. The possibility of this situation to occur is very unlikely if you handle . Here is the deal. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. Re: What happens when a car battery blows up? He was manoeuvring an ROV fitted with a toilet brush a regular brush, bought at the store, he said, just kind of reinforced with a bit of plastic tube. Structures that will eventually be dismantled piece-by-piece look close to collapse but they cant fall down. Taryl and Elk Skins blow up a Krohler 25 hp engine then crack it ope. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) 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. Rebel skirmishes, global politics, and a caustic atmosphere are just some of the obstacles in Christopher Horsleys mission to capture life-saving visuals. At least you can reason with AI. 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. Or how the site evolved from a farm to a nuclear icon and one of the biggest environmental clean-up challenges in Europe? Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. 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. An automated dismantling machine, remote-controlled manipulator arm and crane were used to take it apart piece by piece, leaving only the concrete biological shield and iconic, aluminium-clad shell. This was the Windscale fire which occurred when uranium metal fuel ignited inside Windscale Pile no.1. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. 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. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. A healthy person ingests around 1.5 litres of nasal secretions a day, so sniffing and swallowing isn't harmful. Taking the pessimistic view, that such a release of radioactivity could occur, this article attempts to make a realistic assessment of the damage Ireland might suffer in such an event. Everybodys thinking: What do we do? In Indonesia, sickness and pollution plague a sprawling factory complex that supplies the world with crucial battery materials. 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