Sellafield said in a statement: "These chemicals are used extensively in many industries and are well understood. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. No possible version of the future can be discounted. 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. 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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. The threat, as stated above, is of airborne radioactivity and, even in the worst case, there will be a period of hours before it arrives. Here is the deal. A government inquiry was then held, but its report was not released in full until 1988. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. To take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. I still get lost sometimes here, said Sanna Mustonen, a geologist with Posiva, even after all these years. After Onkalo takes in all its waste, these caverns will be sealed up to the surface with bentonite, a kind of clay that absorbs water, and that is often found in cat litter. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. One heckofa bang, blew the hood off the car and there was a cloud of vapor. Question 4 is what I consider the 'ultimate goal + worst-case scenario' an artist could think of. In other areas of Sellafield, the levels of radiation are so extreme that no humans can ever enter. The possibility of this situation to occur is very unlikely if you handle . The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. Most of it was swarf the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. 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. An area of the site was cordoned off for most of the day, and the canisters disposed of by controlled explosion. The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. Multiple simultaneous launches are detected 2. 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. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. 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. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. And the waste keeps piling up. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. On April 20, 2005 Sellafield workers found a huge leak at Thorp, which first started in July 2004. Theres no fuel coming in. I dont think its really hit the team just yet.. 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. This was lucrative work. But then the pieces were left in the cell. If the Yellowstone supervolcano were to erupt, it would happen like this: Heat rising from deep within the planet's core would begin to melt the molten rock just below the ground's surface. 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. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. 2023 BBC. Prominence has been given to the use of iodine tablets as a means of limiting radiation dose. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. The solution, for now, is vitrification. 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. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. We power-walked past nonetheless. We must assume, however, that we might not be so lucky. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. 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. When records couldnt be found, Sellafield staff conducted interviews with former employees. I kept being told, at Sellafield, that science is still trying to rectify the decisions made in undue haste three-quarters of a century ago. In Lab 188c engineers are using a combination of demolition robots and robot arms to safely demolish and store contaminated equipment. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. In March 2015 work began to pump 1,500 cubic metres of radioactive sludge from the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond, enough to fill seven double-decker buses. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. Since September 11th, public concern in Ireland about Sellafield has taken on the added dimension of fear of a terrorist attack on the plant. In certain other circumstances, their availability could, of course, be very important. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. 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. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. 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. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. 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. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. 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. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. 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. The reprocessing plants end was always coming. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. 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. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. 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. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. 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. Saw one explode from across the street. 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 So it was like: OK, thats it? Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. The video is spectacular. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. "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. Advice, based on knowledge of the radiation levels in a particular area, will be issued on local and national radio as to when it is most important to remain inside, and for how long. Slide the funnel out of the balloon and have your child hold the portion of the balloon with the . Two Cumbrian enviromental protestors fined for blocking London road, Campaign launched for stroke and coronary care services at hospital, Grants fund learning and land management at Cumbrian farm, Starbucks to open in Ulverston this Friday, Learning hub opens in Ulverston for children with special needs, Belgian Beer Festival to take place in Kendal, Human error to blame for deadly train crash, says Greek PM, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. Bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the boxes your voice echoes, off. Which first started in July 2004 an end as well essential source of information and ideas that make of... Emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, you have to put a of... 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