Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. 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. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. Jeremy Hunt wants nuclear power classed as sustainable: is it? The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. So in a couple of thousand years the Earth and the Solar System would be enveloped in hot, highly ionized gas. When all else had failed to stop the fire, Tuohy, a chemist, now dead, scaled the reactor building, took a full blast of the radiation and stared into the blaze below. Video, 00:00:28Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. Anywhere downwind of Sellafield during the releases would be rendered uninhabitable probably for generations and people caught in the fall-out would have a greatly increased chance of getting cancer. Logged. Queen Elizabeth II at the opening ceremony of the Windscale nuclear power station, later known as Sellafield, in 1956. ome industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. The 5million attraction operated for 20 years and will now be demolished this month. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. The place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. The buckets are then fed through an enclosed hole in the wall to a waiting RAPTOR master-slave robot arm encased in a box made of steel and 12mm reinforced glass. But the years-long process of scooping waste out can also feel crude and time-consuming like emptying a wheelie bin with a teaspoon, Phil Atherton, a manager working with the silo team, told me. What Would Happen to Earth if Mars Suddenly Exploded The Infographics Show 12.7M subscribers 8.1K 288K views 10 months ago The end of the world could come from another World War, or a natural. She meets aunts and cousins on her shifts all the time. Those who were working there didn't want to be seen against the thing," says Mary Johnson, now in her 90s, who was bornon the farm that was compulsorily purchased to become the site of Sellafield. I left in 1990 a free man but plutonium-exposed. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. Now I look back and think, no, we caused that," says McManus. The UK is currently home to 112 tonnes of what is the most toxic substance ever created - and most of it is held in a modern grey building to one side of the site. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. These people have pontificated about bringing the stuff in from outside systems and that would give the kids leukaemia. 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. We ran punishment runs past it, danced at Calder girls school, kissed the daughters of the scientists, were jeered at by the workers for wearing shorts and we got shown round it, I am almost certain, by Tom Tuohy, whose son was at school with us. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. 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. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. 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. A terrorist attack on Sellafield could render the north of England uninhabitable and release 100 times the radioactivity produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the House of Commons defence committee was told yesterday. Video, 00:00:33Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. A report from Steve Healey, the chief fire officer for Cumbria, revealed the affected area covers a 50-kilometre circular zone from an epicentre at Sellafield. All rights reserved. When you asked, 'How many would you expect in a community of 2,000 people?' The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. 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. Among the possibilities Dr Thompson raised was a vast release of liquid waste into the Irish Sea. NDA is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and publishes a tax strategy for the NDA Group in accordance . Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. Things could get much worse. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? Dr Thompson said: "A civilian nuclear facility is a potential radiological weapon if the facility contains a large amount of radioactive material that can be released into the environment. Depending on the direction of the wind, cities like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Leeds would be well within fallout range, as would be Dublin. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. The video is spectacular. Dr Thompson, who was based in the UK for 10 years and gave evidence at the 1977 Windscale inquiry into reprocessing at Sellafield, and the Sizewell inquiry, is an expert on the potential fallout from a nuclear accident or deliberate act of terrorism. Seagulls chatter, the hum of machinery is constant, a pipe zig-zagging across the ground vents steam. 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. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. The missiles with proximity fuses generally detonate when they come within a certain distance of their target. Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. Anywhere downwind of Sellafield during the releases would be rendered uninhabitable probably for generations and people caught in the fall-out would have a greatly increased chance of getting . Mario was too iconic to fail. 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. But at Sellafield, with all its caches of radioactivity, the thought of catastrophe is so ever-present that you feel your surroundings with a heightened keenness. 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. The solution, for now, is vitrification. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. The sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least 300m. 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. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. 2023 BBC. All rights reserved. "It was a great job. . 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. What is radioactive waste management? 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. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. But how did Sellafield become Europe's nuclear dustbin and the target of so much hostility to nuclear power? The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. 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. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. After a brief, initial flash, Betelgeuse will brighten tremendously . 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. 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. A super-massive black hole couldn't explode. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. 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. The most vulnerable part of the facilities at Sellafield, dating back to the 1950s, contain giant tanks of high level radioactive waste which has to be constantly cooled and stirred to prevent a chain reaction. 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. Read about our approach to external linking. It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. All rights reserved. Type II supernova explosions are expected to occur in . WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. 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. Video, 00:01:13Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. "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. This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. The area includes as far south as Walney, east as Bowness and north almost to the Scottish border. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six square kilometre site, Sellafield has its own train station, police force and fire service, Some buildings at Sellafield date back to the late-1950s when the UK was racing to build its first nuclear bomb, Low and intermediate-level radioactive waste is temporarially being stored in 50-tonne concrete blocks, Much of Sellafield's decomissioning work is done by robots to protect humans from deadly levels of radiation, The cavernous Thorp facility reprocesses spent nuclear fuel from the UK and overseas, Cumbria County Council rejected an application. 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. It wasnt. I was a non-desirable person on site.". Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. You see, an explosion usually inflicts damage in two major ways . 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. 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.

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