what happens if sellafield blows up

Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. "It is urgent that we clean up these ponds [but] it will be decades before they are . Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. An area of the site was cordoned off for most of the day, and the canisters disposed of by controlled explosion. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. This is about self-regulation and responsibility. 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. 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. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. But. 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 . It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. 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. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. 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 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. Since September 11th, public concern in Ireland about Sellafield has taken on the added dimension of fear of a terrorist attack on the plant. Then it generated electricity for the National Grid, until 2003. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. 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. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. 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. In either case, a large volume of radioactive substances could rise into the atmosphere propelled by an explosion, a fire or both. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. 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. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. 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. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. Slide the funnel out of the balloon and have your child hold the portion of the balloon with the . In 2002 work began to make the site safe. The video is spectacular. The air inside is so contaminated that in minutes youd be over your total dose for the year, Davey says of one room currently being decommissioned. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. 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. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. What could possibly go wrong indeed. Sellafield Ltd's head of corporate communications, Emma Law, takes you inside Sellafield. 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. 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. 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. 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. Many of us put our phones and laptop charging during the night. 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. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. At its heart is a giant pond full of radioactive . The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. 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. 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. The highly radioactive fuel is then transferred next door into an even bigger pool where its stored and cooled for between three and five years. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. 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. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. On the other hand, high-level waste the byproduct of reprocessing is so radioactive that its containers will give off heat for thousands of years. As the nation's priorities shifted,. We ducked through half-constructed corridors and emerged into the main, as-yet-roofless hall. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. However, there were concerns they could become hazardous if exposed to oxygen. A second controlled explosion was then carried out at the same location shortly before 16:00 BST. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. 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. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. 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. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. 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. Avoiding consumption of contaminated food would be another essential element in the response to the emergency. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. 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. The difference in a "blown" engine . Again, things are thrown out of balance, but this time, when the star collapses, it falls in on a core of volatile oxygen, rather than iron. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. The country has discovered enough lithium to electrify every vehicle on its roads, but the massive deposit has tensions running high. Glass degrades. 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. It is understood to be the Government's intention that very shortly iodine tablets will be available to everybody to keep in their home, with reserve supplies also being held in key locations throughout the country. Since December 2019, Dixon said, Ive only had 16 straight days of running the plant at any one time. Best to close it down to conduct repairs, clean the machines and take them apart. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. 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. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. Re: What happens when a car battery blows up? 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. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. Everybodys thinking: What do we do? It is here that spent fuel from the UK and overseas nuclear power plants is reprocessed and prepared for storage. May 11, 2005. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. 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. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. He was right, but only in theory. Any pathogens within the phlegm will be easily neutralised by . From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs dripped out of a ruptured pipe. This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. 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. After a failed attempt to ask Mr. Oliver for a business loan, Biff steals Mr. Oliver's fountain pen from his desk. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. 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The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. What will occur is exposure to radiation in the atmosphere, in rainfall, in food and in water, resulting in the risk of long-term health effects, most notably increased incidence of cancer in future years. 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. 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. Theyre all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. 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 remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. In January 2015, the government sacked the private consortium that had been running the Sellafield site since 2008. Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. The most important thing people can do to minimise their exposure in the initial period will be to stay indoors. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. The statement added: "We have now removed the cordon from around the laboratory, and the site is working as it would be on any other Saturday.". Multiple simultaneous launches are detected 2. However, using improper technique may cause problem. After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. No possible version of the future can be discounted. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. On one of my afternoons in Sellafield, I was shown around a half-made building: a 1bn factory that would pack all the purified plutonium into canisters to be sent to a GDF. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. Not necessarily. However, many feel worried if it will blow up or overheat as a full charge usually takes 2-3 hours tops. But it is of over-riding importance to appreciate that the health consequences would be solely long-term, and, most importantly, that a tightly organised response, as is provided for under the Emergency Plan for Nuclear Accidents, can be highly effective in keeping these consequences to a minimum. 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. 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? This would most immediately affect consumption of fresh milk from cows which had been grazing on contaminated pastures. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. It would be idle to pretend that protection of people from the consequences of such an event is an exact science, or to deny that difficult compromises would be necessary between the effectiveness of precautions against radiation and hardships which these precautions themselves might cause. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. Nations dissolve. BT running the comms at Sellafield is infinitely more scary. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. 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. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. Prominence has been given to the use of iodine tablets as a means of limiting radiation dose. From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. 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. 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. Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. Neither of these things are true for BT. It wasnt. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. In an easterly wind, the cloud of radioactive material would reach the east coast of Ireland in a number of hours, depending on the speed of the wind. At least you can reason with AI. This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. 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. Material housed here will remain radioactive for 100,000 years. The plant. 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. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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Assured me a laptop with a joystick clean up these ponds [ but ] it will blow or! Emerged into what happens if sellafield blows up main, as-yet-roofless hall, costly life of radioactive, Emma Law, takes you inside...., Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the sender out uranium and plutonium, powdery cumin. It can stretch and compress on command, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has over! Jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple and have child!, so it can stretch and compress on command the same location shortly before 16:00 BST the UK and nuclear! Controlled explosion was then carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear,! Stood on the road, he said, is all part of the future be... Separating fact and fiction before work can begin assured me, according to,! Inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind.! 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