what would happen if sellafield exploded

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. 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. 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. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. 6 Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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. The total amount released from Chernobyl was 27 kilograms, almost 100 times less than the potential release from the facility at Sellafield. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. 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. 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. Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. 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. Then it generated electricity for the National Grid, until 2003. 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. But you know you were scared stiff really. 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. Sellafield is now completely controlled by the government-run Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. The UKs plans are at an earlier stage. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. Correction: we mixed up the Sun's lifespan with its age. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. 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. So in a couple of thousand years the Earth and the Solar System would be enveloped in hot, highly ionized gas. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Once the room is cleared, humans can go in. Video, 00:00:35Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. The air was pure Baltic brine. 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. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. 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. It marked Sellafields transition from an operational facility to a depot devoted purely to storage and containment. Structures that will eventually be dismantled piece-by-piece look close to collapse but they cant fall down. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. It says something for how Britain's nuclear establishment worked from the start that when Windscale No1 Pile caught fire in October 1957, it was hushed up so well that even with 11 tons of uranium ablaze for three days, the reactor close to collapse and radioactive material spreading across the Lake District, the people who worked there were expected to keep quiet and carry on making plutonium for the bomb. These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. Then, at last, the reprocessing plant will be placed on fire watch, visited periodically to ensure nothing in the building is going up in flames, but otherwise left alone for decades for its radioactivity to dwindle, particle by particle. Is Sellafield worse than Chernobyl? 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. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. 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. They dont know how much time theyll need to mop up all the waste, or how long theyll have to store it, or what Sellafield will look like afterwards. 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. I was a radiation leper. Many of the earliest structures here, said Dan Bowman, the head of operations at one of Sellafields two waste storage ponds, werent even built with decommissioning in mind. 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. An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. The Windscale gas-cooled reactor took nine years to decommission. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. Spent fuel rods and radioactive pieces of metal rest in skips, which in turn are submerged in open, rectangular ponds, where water cools them and absorbs their radiation. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. Where the waste goes next is controversial. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. Cassidys pond, which holds 14,000 cubic metres of water, resembles an extra-giant, extra-filthy lido planted in the middle of an industrial park. (modern), Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. 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. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. The video is spectacular. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. 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. In comparison, consider how different the world looked a mere 7,000 years ago, when a determined pedestrian could set out from the Humber estuary, in northern England, and walk across to the Netherlands and then to Norway. 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. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent, says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield. Video, 00:01:13, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. 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. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. 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. Game adaptations after him will have to try harder. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. Management, profligate with money, was criminally careless with safety and ecology. Waste disposal is a completely solved problem, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, declared in 1979. 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. 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 flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. 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. This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. But, thanks to Sellafield Stories, a book of interviews with nearly 100 people who worked there, . The tanks contain high level radioactive waste in the form of self heating, acidic liquid that requries continuous cooling and agitation.". Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. The two liquids mixed and exploded, destroying the orbiter with it. 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. 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. The future is rosy. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. 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. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. The solution, for now, is vitrification. I stood there for a while, transfixed by the sight of a building going up even as its demolition was already foretold, feeling the water-filled coolness of the fresh, metre-thick concrete walls, and trying to imagine the distant, dreamy future in which all of Sellafield would be returned to fields and meadows again. 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. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Sellafield now requires 2bn a year to maintain. ", Updated 19/09/16, 16:00 - References to certain building names have been removed at the request of Sellafield, Inside Sellafield: how the UK's most dangerous nuclear site is cleaning up its act, Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. 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 year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. With every passing year, maintaining the worlds costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous. 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.

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