what would happen if sellafield explodedwhat would happen if sellafield exploded

"It's so political that science doesn't matter. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. 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. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isnt just being metaphorical. I left in 1990 a free man but plutonium-exposed. A government inquiry was then held, but its report was not released in full until 1988. The facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. When you asked, 'How many would you expect in a community of 2,000 people?' Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. 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. What is building B30 in Sellafield? - Worldsrichpeople.com Tellers complete solution is still a hypothesis. 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. The ceiling for now is 53bn. Read about our approach to external linking. The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. 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 must be one of the biggest questions yet and is on everyone's mind. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, lived nearby or whose lives havebeen linked to the vast WestCumbrian nuclear complex, we know more now about how people really reacted. The missiles with proximity fuses generally detonate when they come within a certain distance of their target. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Until then, Bowman and others will bend their ingenuity to a seemingly self-contradictory exercise: dismantling Sellafield while keeping it from falling apart along the way. Type II supernova explosions are expected to occur in . The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. Fifteen years after the New Mexico site opened, a drum of waste burst open, leaking radiation up an exhaust shaft and then for a kilometre or so above ground. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. 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. And here, over roughly 20m years, the uranium and other bits of space dust and debris cohered to form our planet in such a way that the violent tectonics of the young Earth pushed the uranium not towards its hot core but up into the folds of its crust. 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. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. 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. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. 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. Not everything at Sellafield is so seemingly clean and simple. What happened to Fiddlers Ferry power station? - TimesMojo 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. Laid out over six square kilometres, Sellafield is like a small town, with nearly a thousand buildings, its own roads and even a rail siding all owned by the government, and requiring security clearance to visit. As a result, Bowman admitted, Sellafields scientists are having to invent, mid-marathon, the process of winding the site down and theyre finding that they still dont know enough about it. Now I look back and think, no, we caused that," says McManus. Management, profligate with money, was criminally careless with safety and ecology. 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. 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. Now its operators are in a race against time to make the most dangerous areas safe. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. 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. 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 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. If the Saturn V went boom: The effects of a Saturn V - The Space Review It was a historic occasion. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. This is what will happen when Trump is arrested. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafields infrastructure. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. "You kept quiet. It thought nothing of trying to block Wastwater lake to get more water or trying to mine the national park for a waste dump. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. Video, 00:00:19, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape. 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. 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. Security researchers are jailbreaking large language models to get around safety rules. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. Jeremy Hunt accused of 20bn gamble on nuclear energy and carbon capture, 50m fund will boost UK nuclear fuel projects, ministers say, Hopes for power and purpose from an energy industry in flux, EUs emissions continue to fall despite return to coal, Despite the hype, we shouldnt bank on nuclear fusion to save the world from climate catastrophe, Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean near-limitless energy, Sizewell C confirmed again this time it might be the real deal. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. Read about our approach to external linking. The popular centre, operated by BNFL, was officially opened in 1988 by Prince Philip and went on to become one of West Cumbria's biggest tourist attractions. 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. Video, 00:01:07Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. The plant has changed. The snake, though, could slither right in through a hole drilled into a cell wall, and right up to a two-metre-high, double-walled steel vat once used to dissolve fuel in acid. The contingency planning that scientists do today the kind that wasnt done when the industry was in its infancy contends with yawning stretches of time. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. 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. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. 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. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. So it was like: OK, thats it? Sellafield hasnt suffered an accident of equivalent scale since the 1957 fire, but the niggling fear that some radioactivity is leaking out of the facility in some fashion has never entirely vanished. The less you know about it the less you can tell anyone else.". Flasks of nuclear waste in the vitrified product store at Sellafield in 2003. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. If the Saturn V exploded, it could do so with the force of a small atomic bomb, the equivalent of half a kiloton, or about 1/26th the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. 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. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. But the pursuit of commercial reprocessing turned Sellafield and a similar French site into de facto waste dumps, the journalist Stephanie Cooke found in her book In Mortal Hands. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. It was useless with people, too. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. Material housed here will remain radioactive for 100,000 years. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. (That 121bn price tag may swell further.) Dr Thompson said that the buildings designed in the 1950s could not withstand a crash from an airliner. Has fiddlers ferry power station closed? "He was standing there putting water in and if things had gone wrong with the water it had never been tried before on a reactor fire if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. Video, 00:00:35Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. The process will cost at least 121bn. Environmental campaigners argue burying nuclear waste underground is a disaster waiting to happen. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, . We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle, Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) A supernova remnant such as the Crab Nebula is about 11 light-year in diameter (and expanding at 0.5% the speed of light), and that star exploded about 1000 years ago. 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. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. This was where, in the early 1950s, the Windscale facility produced the Plutonium-239 that would be used in the UKs first nuclear bomb. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. The air was pure Baltic brine. 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. Armed heist at Paris luxury jewellery store in daylight. Its roots in weaponry explain the high security and the arrogance of its inward-looking early management. Walk inside and your voice echoes, bouncing off a two-storey tall steel door that blocks entry to the core. Here's a look at the technology being used in the clean-up operation. Lets go home, Dixon said. Their further degradation is a sure thing. 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 . Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. What If Betelgeuse Exploded Right Now? The future is rosy. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. 2023 BBC. 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. What is radioactive waste management? Often we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there, he says. Well, from the interviews with Raaz, Reed and former Sellafield boss Barry Snelson, there isn't any. 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. However, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday that a "quick response" procedure was in place to cover the whole of the country in the event of a hijack attack. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. 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. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Commissioned in 1952, waste was still being dumped into the 20 metre-long pond as recently as 1992. But we also know from the interviews that it was largely thanks to the courage of deputy general manager Tom Tuohy that the Lake District is still habitable today. Of course the sun is only about 4.6 billion years old, half way through its lifespan of about 10 bil. I remember my dad saying the nuclear scientists thought they were "little gods" and my mum demanding that our medical records include the fact we were at school so close to the reactors. Video, 00:01:07, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. Logged. Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said he believed that documents from both the nuclear industry and the government showed neither had ever attempted a thorough analysis of the threat or the options for reducing it. Can Sellafield be bombed? Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. It recklessly dumped contaminated water out to sea and filled old mines with radioactive waste. But some folk could laugh it off. This burial plan is the governments agreed solution but public and political opposition, combined with difficulties in finding a site, have seen proposals stall. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? - Quora Its a major project, Turner said, like the Chunnel or the Olympics.. 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. I'm not sure if this would be fatal but it's not good. Is Hinkley Point closing? - TimesMojo Game adaptations after him will have to try harder. There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. What Caused the Challenger Disaster? - History Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. "A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. What If the Sun Exploded Tomorrow? - YouTube If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. 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. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. (modern). What would happen if Sellafield exploded? (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. I was a non-desirable person on site.". The sheer force of these supernova detonations mashed together the matter in. 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. This has been corrected. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. 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. 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. Responding to the accusations, Sellafield said there was no question it was safe. What Could Happen-Radiation? Video, 00:01:15, Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. To take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. Things could get much worse. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Scientists believe lasting symptoms following a coronavirus infection is not a single disorder. From an operational nuclear facility, Sellafield turned into a full-time storage depot but an uncanny, precarious one, filled with toxic nuclear waste that has to be kept contained at any cost. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. In 2002 work began to make the site safe. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. Mario was too iconic to fail. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. Video, 00:01:15Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. 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. SATURN READY TO EXPLODE - Weekly World News 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. If the geology is simple, and were disposing of just high- and intermediate-level waste, then were thinking 20bn, said Jonathan Turner, a geologist with Nuclear Waste Services. 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. Train tracks criss-cross the ground as we pass Calder Hall and park up next to a featureless red and black building. 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. WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. Can you shutdown a nuclear plant? Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. 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. Now it needs to clean-up. The Search for Long Covid Treatments Takes a Promising Turn. 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. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. This is what creates a Type II supernova: the core-collapse of an ultra-massive star. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. How will the rock bear up if, in the next ice age, tens of thousands of years from today, a kilometre or two of ice forms on the surface? 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. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. What was once a point of pride and scientific progress is a paranoid, locked-down facility. Can you visit Sizewell B? Video, 00:05:44Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, One-minute World News. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. Thorp was closed for two years as a result of the leak, costing tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue. Sellafield Visitors' Centre will be demolished this month. 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. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Most of the atoms in our daily lives the carbon in the wood of a desk, the oxygen in the air, the silicon in window glass have stable nuclei. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. Don't get me wrong. Structures that will eventually be dismantled piece-by-piece look close to collapse but they cant fall down. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. Its an existential threat to link-in-bio companies. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. As the nation's priorities shifted,. 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 . "Nobody yet has come up with a different suggestion other than sticking it in the ground, Davey tells me, half-jokingly. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. . The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. 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. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. More dangerous still are the 20 tonnes of melted fuel inside a reactor that caught fire in 1957 and has been sealed off and left alone ever since. The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. If you lived on a certain street, you were of a certain status within the works. In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. 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. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. But you know you were scared stiff really. 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. . 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. What If Betelgeuse Exploded Right Now? - YouTube These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable.