Video, 00:05:44, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. I was a non-desirable person on site.". Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. Video, 00:01:13Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation.". Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. 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 now requires 2bn a year to maintain. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. A 2,000-mile high pillar of cloud has formed on Saturn and scientists believe the planet may explode in the near future. After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. 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 was useless with people, too. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. But the boxes, for now, are safe. 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. 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 lab operated in the 1970s and produced the Plutonium-238 used in early cardiac pacemakers and as a primary fuel source for Nasas deep space missions where solar energy isnt available. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. 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. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. No possible version of the future can be discounted. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. At first scientists believed that the fog near Saturn was coming from Saturn's moon, Titan, but on closer examination it appears that Saturn is undergoing a cataclysm and it could destroy itself in the next ten months. For six weeks, Sellafields engineers prepared for the task, rehearsing on a 3D model, ventilating the cell, setting up a stream of air to blow away the molten metal, ensuring that nothing caught fire from the lasers sparks. Now I look back and think, no, we caused that," says McManus. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. 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. Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Western Europe, reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, splitting it into plutonium, uranium and waste. 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. On April 20, 2005 Sellafield workers found a huge leak at Thorp, which first started in July 2004. Lets go home, Dixon said. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. The site was too complex to be run privately, officials argued. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. 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. 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. If you lived on a certain street, you were of a certain status within the works. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. 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. Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? Here's Dick Raaz, the outgoing head of the waste depository: "The good news about radioactive waste is it self-destructs, if you just give it long enough." Mario was too iconic to fail. "What aroused my anxieties was within 12 or 18 months I conducted the funerals of thee children who died of leukaemia. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. 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. 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. Weve walked a short distance from the 'golf ball' to a cavernous hangar used to store the waste. Compared to the longevity of nuclear waste, Sellafield has only been around for roughly the span of a single lunch break within a human life. Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. 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. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. Dr Thompson's report, sent this week in response to the committee's call for new evidence following a report it published last month, is likely further to alarm the Irish government, which has repeatedly protested about danger from the high level waste tanks at Sellafield. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. 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. 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 reprocessing plants end was always coming. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. The place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. Video, 00:00:19, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. Video, 00:05:44Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, One-minute World News. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. 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. . 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. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. The outside of the container is decontaminated before it is moved to Sellafields huge vitrified product store, an air-cooled facility currently home to 6,000 containers. This, he explains, is all part of the robot-led decommissioning process. The task of shooting down a hijacked commercial airliner has been assigned to RAF Tornado F3 fighters based at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. This may result in the declaration of an Off-Site Nuclear Emergency. Sellafield, formerly a Royal Ordnance Factory, began producing plutonium in 1947. Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. Not far from the silos, I met John Cassidy, who has helped manage one of Sellafields waste storage ponds for more than three decades so long that a colleague called him the Oracle. Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. Is Sellafield worse than Chernobyl? Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. (modern), Archive British Path footage of a 1957 news report on radioactive dust escaping from Windscale. Seven rare cancers were found in the small Seascale community between 1955 and 1983, yet the authorities "proved" this was due to the natural movement of people. Some industrial machines have soothing names; the laser snake is not one of them. Can you visit Sizewell B? WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. Overseas reprocessing contracts signed since 1976 require that this vitrified waste is returned to the country of origin, meaning Sellafield now only has responsibility for storing the UKs vitrified waste. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. The UKs earliest reactors a type called Magnox were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. And the waste keeps piling up. But, the book suggests, its sheer physical isolation may have been responsible for some of the deep fears that people have of nuclear power. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. Video, 00:00:49, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? 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. In 1956 this stretch of Cumbrian coast witnessed Queen Elizabeth II opening Calder Hall, the worlds first commercial nuclear power station. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. But how did Sellafield become Europe's nuclear dustbin and the target of so much hostility to nuclear power? Video, 00:00:28, Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital. Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. Amid tight security at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, is a store holding most of Britain's stockpile of plutonium. Seagulls chatter, the hum of machinery is constant, a pipe zig-zagging across the ground vents steam. The sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in. This process, according to Davey, is about separating fact and fiction before work can begin. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. The dissolved fuel, known as liquor, comprises 96 per cent uranium, one per cent plutonium and three per cent high-level waste containing every element in the periodic table. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is a place where multiple time spans some fleeting, some cosmic drift in and out of view. 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. That forecast has aged poorly. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. He said these tanks contained 2,400 kilograms of caeisium-137, the main cause of off-site radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. 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. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. 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. The 5million attraction operated for 20 years and will now be demolished this month. . The facility has an 8,000 container capacity. The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. It will be finished a century or so from now. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. In Sellafield, these nuclear divers will put on radiation-proof wetsuits and tidy up the pond floor, reaching the places where robotic arms cannot go. All rights reserved. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. 2023 BBC. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. "Things did go wrong so you just didn'ttake any notice. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. One retired worker, who now lives in nearby Seascale, thought there might be a dropped fuel rod in one of the glove boxes a rumour that turned out to be false. So it was like: OK, thats it? These people have pontificated about bringing the stuff in from outside systems and that would give the kids leukaemia. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. 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. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. 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. 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. Workers at Sellafield, reporting their alarming radiation exposure to their managers, were persuaded that theyd walk [it] off on the way home, the Daily Mirror reported at the time. 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. In the waters gloom, cameras offer little help, he said: Youre mostly playing by feel. In the two preceding months, the team had pulled out enough waste to fill four skips. It marked Sellafields transition from an operational facility to a depot devoted purely to storage and containment. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. Every month one of 13 easy-to-access boxes is lifted onto a platform and inspected on all sides for signs of damage and leakage. It is now home to a one-tonne BROKK-90 demolition machine which smashes up sections of the lab and loads them into plastic buckets on a conveyer belt. For the next decade, it was central to the UK's nuclear weapons programme, before it was taken over by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in 1954. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. "You kept quiet. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. 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. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. 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 . Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. This is what creates a Type II supernova: the core-collapse of an ultra-massive star. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) Then, having driven through a high-security gate, youre surrounded by towering chimneys, pipework, chugging cooling plants, everything dressed in steampunk. The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. 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. 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. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. "I often think there will have been a Seascale cluster of leukaemia because that's where the fallout from the big chimneys was closest. 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. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. 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. 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. For three days, no one living in the area was told about the gravity of the accident, or even advised to stay indoors and shut their windows. "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. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. There are a few reasons why they detonate before hitting the target: one, an 'air burst' renders more damage over a larger area without actually hitting anything. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. 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. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water. 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.
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