what would happen if sellafield exploded

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. 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. The task of shooting down a hijacked commercial airliner has been assigned to RAF Tornado F3 fighters based at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. Accidents had to be modelled. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. The GDF will effectively entomb not just decades of nuclear waste but also the decades-old idea that atomic energy will be both easy and cheap the very idea that drove the creation of Sellafield, where the worlds earliest nuclear aspirations began. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined 10,000. The government continues to seek volunteers for what would be one of the most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK. The fact that much of the workforce was drawn from the declining local iron ore and coal mines may explain the camaraderie of the workers and the vibrant community. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. Eventually, the plant will be taller than Westminster Abbey and as part of the decommissioning process, this structure too will be torn down once it has finished its task, decades from now. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. Lets go home, Dixon said. 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. No. 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. 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. 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. I left in 1990 a free man but plutonium-exposed. What If 7.16M subscribers 1.9M views 3 years ago #Betelgeuse At about 950 times bigger than our Sun, Betelgeuse is one of the biggest stars in our Universe.. At one spot, our trackers went mad. It marked Sellafields transition from an operational facility to a depot devoted purely to storage and containment. A super-massive black hole couldn't explode. It is one of several hugely necessary, and hugely complex, clean-up jobs that must be undertaken at Sellafield. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. Every family has someone who worked there or has somehow benefited from it. Now I look back and think, no, we caused that," says McManus. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. I was a non-desirable person on site.". An anonymous whistleblower who used to be a senior manager at Sellafield told the broadcasters Panorama programme that he worried about the safety of the site every day. After a brief, initial flash, Betelgeuse will brighten tremendously . In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. Among its labyrinth of scruffy, dilapidated rooms are dozens of glove boxes used to cut up fuel rods. "I could always tell when my husband had been irradiated because his hair was standing on end when he came home," says Pam Eldred, wife of Wally. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. What happened to Fiddlers Ferry power station? - TimesMojo "You kept quiet. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. 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. 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. This is what will happen when Trump is arrested. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. 2023 BBC. What Caused the Challenger Disaster? - History Now its operators are in a race against time to make the most dangerous areas safe. Depending on the direction of the wind, cities like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Leeds would be well within fallout range, as would be Dublin. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield - BBC News About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded. Both buildings, for the most part, remain standing to this day. Glass degrades. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. 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. if it had exploded, Cumberland would have been finished, blown to smithereens. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. It was just bonkers," says Alan Postlethwaite, the truculentvicar of Seascale, who was accused of being a crypto-communist for even thinking the plant might be linked to cancers. and were told, 'Perhaps one in 20 years' and you'd had three in a year that's something to bother about. We power-walked past nonetheless. Then it generated electricity for the National Grid, until 2003. 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. . 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 . 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. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. Dr Thompson said that the buildings designed in the 1950s could not withstand a crash from an airliner. Now it needs to clean-up. Like malign glitter, radioactivity gets everywhere, turning much of what it touches into nuclear waste. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. Video, 00:00:35, Drone captures moment lost child is found, Watch: Massive flames rise from Crimea oil tank. 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. One of of the sites oldest buildings, constructed in the 1950s, carried out analytical chemistry and sampling of nuclear material. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? As a project, tackling Sellafields nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the poky stick approach. 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. The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. A terrorist attack on Sellafield could render the north of England uninhabitable and release 100 times the radioactivity produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the House of. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. 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. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. Once the room is cleared, humans can go in. Everyone in West Cumbria has a relationship with Sellafield. Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. We power-walked past nonetheless. They told me I had a lung burden and that was an accumulation from the 30-odd years I'd worked at Sellafield. We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle, Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) Sellafields waste spent fuel rods, scraps of metal, radioactive liquids, a miscellany of other debris is parked in concrete silos, artificial ponds and sealed buildings. 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." Video, 00:01:07, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. 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. And that put the frighteners on us because we had small children. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. "A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. It thought nothing of trying to block Wastwater lake to get more water or trying to mine the national park for a waste dump. 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. All rights reserved. Pipes run in every direction and a lattice of scaffolding blocks out the sky. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. 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. . Near Sellafield, radioactive iodine found its way into the grass of the meadows where dairy cows grazed, so that samples of milk taken in the weeks after the fire showed 10 times the permissible level. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. Six decades after Britain's worst nuclear accident, an oral history of Sellafield reveals what it felt like to live near the plant, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. (modern), Archive British Path footage of a 1957 news report on radioactive dust escaping from Windscale. 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. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. All rights reserved. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece. A drive around the perimeter takes 40 minutes. On one floor, we stopped to look at a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV a steamer trunk-sized thing with a yellow carapace, floating in the algal-green water. Dr Thompson said: "A civilian nuclear facility is a potential radiological weapon if the facility contains a large amount of radioactive material that can be released into the environment. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. 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. Near-Earth supernova - Wikipedia If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. This tick-tock noise, emitted by Tannoys dotted throughout the facility, is the equivalent of an 'everything's okay' alarm. Its a warm August afternoon and Im standing on a grassy scrap of land squinting at the most dangerous industrial building in western Europe. A terrorist attack on Sellafield could render the north of England uninhabitable and release 100 times the radioactivity produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the House of Commons defence committee was told yesterday. One moment youre passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. The source of the leak, as America soon learned, was traced to a tiny rubber part called an O-ring, which formed the seal . The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. 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. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. The problem is that the plant which is supposed to turn this liquid waste into more managable and less dangerous glass blocks has never worked properly and a backlog cannot be cleared for another 15 years. 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. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rocks surface undulated like soft butter. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. If an emergency does occur, radioactive airborne contamination may be Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. When you asked, 'How many would you expect in a community of 2,000 people?' A terrorist attack on Sellafield could render the north of England uninhabitable and release 100 times the radioactivity produced by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, the House of Commons defence committee was told yesterday. The UKs plans are at an earlier stage. 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. Sellafield nuclear site a 'toxic mix of bullying and harassment' After its fat, six-metre-long body slinks out of its cage-like housing, it can rear up in serpentine fashion, as if scanning its surroundings for prey. These are areas outside of the immediate vacinity which could be affected by a disaster. As of 2014 the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond contained 1,200 cubic metres of radioactive sludge. Damon Lindelofs new Peacock series is about a tech-averse nun on a quest for the Holy Grail. Where the waste goes next is controversial. Video, 00:00:33, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. 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. Sellafield, formerly a Royal Ordnance Factory, began producing plutonium in 1947. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea. 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 buckets are then fed through an enclosed hole in the wall to a waiting RAPTOR master-slave robot arm encased in a box made of steel and 12mm reinforced glass. The missiles with proximity fuses generally detonate when they come within a certain distance of their target. To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. 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. Can you visit nuclear power plants? - AnswersAll For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. Sellafield chemical find prompts bomb squad visit - BBC News 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. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. 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 . Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafields knowledge of itself. In other areas of Sellafield, the levels of radiation are so extreme that no humans can ever enter. An older reprocessing plant on site earned 9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. The skips of extricated waste will be compacted to a third of their volume, grouted and moved into another Sellafield warehouse; at some point, they will be sequestered in the ground, in the GDF that is, at present, hypothetical. 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. As the nation's priorities shifted,. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. I was a radiation leper. The future is rosy. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. A moment of use, centuries of quarantine: radiation tends to twist time all out of proportion. 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. It wasnt. 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 leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. "Things did go wrong so you just didn'ttake any notice. WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. You see, an explosion usually inflicts damage in two major ways . They dont know exactly what theyll find in the silos and ponds. What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? The bad news from the new management? We ran punishment runs past it, danced at Calder girls school, kissed the daughters of the scientists, were jeered at by the workers for wearing shorts and we got shown round it, I am almost certain, by Tom Tuohy, whose son was at school with us. 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. Sellafield is protected by its own police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), and its own fire service. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Sellafield: 'It was all contaminated: milk, chickens, the golf course It will be finished a century or so from now. An emergency could occur following a fire, explosion, seismic event or serious leak in one of the areas handling radioactive materials at the Sellafield Site. (modern). Video, 00:00:33Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. Has fiddlers ferry power station closed? Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore.

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