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 was lucrative work. 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. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that there is the world of difference between being at, or very close to, the site of a major nuclear disaster and being 100 miles away, as the nearest point in this country is from Sellafield; or even 60 miles away as we are from Wylfa nuclear power station in north Wales, which is the nuclear installation nearest to Ireland. 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 huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. 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. This would most immediately affect consumption of fresh milk from cows which had been grazing on contaminated pastures. 1. 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. This is about self-regulation and responsibility. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. The Baking Soda Balloon Blow-Up Experiment. 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. Regardless of who runs it, Sellafield could remain one of Europes most toxic sites for millennia. 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. Biologists are working to quickly grow hardier specimens that can be propagated and transplanted by robotic arms. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. In either case, a large volume of radioactive substances could rise into the atmosphere propelled by an explosion, a fire or both. In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. This is Thorp, Sellafields Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant. Every day 10,000 litres of demineralised water is pumped in to keep the pool clean. 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. 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. 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. 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. 1. But then the pieces were left in the cell. 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. The remaining waste is mixed with glass and heated to 1,200C. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. Effective restrictions on supply of such milk or other affected foods would have to be put in place. It is vital that it be brought home to every member of the public that this would not be the case. One heckofa bang, blew the hood off the car and there was a cloud of vapor. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. A later report found a design error caused the leak, which was allowed to continue undetected due to a complacent culture at the facility. The air inside is so contaminated that in minutes youd be over your total dose for the year, Davey says of one room currently being decommissioned. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. The leak caused 83 cubic metres of nitric acid solution to seep from a broken pipe into a secondary containment chamber - a stainless steel tub encased in two-metre-thick reinforced concrete with a capacity of 250 cubic metres. All radioactivity is a search for stability. Most of the plants at Sellafield, for instance, because of their nature, do not contain radioactive iodine and iodine tablets would, therefore, have no place in the response to a disaster. But it is of over-riding importance to appreciate that the health consequences would be solely long-term, and, most importantly, that a tightly organised response, as is provided for under the Emergency Plan for Nuclear Accidents, can be highly effective in keeping these consequences to a minimum. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. 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. The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. The building is so dangerous that it has been fitted with an alarm that sounds constantly to let everyone know they are safe. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. That one there, thats the second most dangerous, says Andrew Cooney, technical manager at Sellafield, nodding in the direction of another innocuous-looking site on the vast complex. 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. BT running the comms at Sellafield is infinitely more scary. 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. Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries, but only six have either started building or completed construction of geological disposal facilities. Six years ago, the snakes creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. 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. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. 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. In a factory on the outskirts of Glasgow, aerospace manufacturer Skyrora is building rockets for a space-bound taxi service for satellites. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. Within minutes of arriving by train at the tiny, windswept Sellafield train station the photographer I visited the site with was met by armed police. THE Irish population is "a sitting duck" in the event of a nuclear accident at Sellafield, Green Party deputy leader, Mary White warned yesterday. Flasks ranging in size from 50 tonnes to 110 tonnes, some measuring three metres high, arrive at Thorp by freight train and are lifted out remotely by a 150-tonne crane. He was right, but only in theory. The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. The leak was eventually contained and the liquid returned to primary storage. In Taryl's final installment of 2020's Halloween how-to series, we bring you "The Glob". First, would the effects of a terrorist attack be worse than an accident? Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. 1. The prevailing wind being south-westerly, we might hope that this material would be blown away from us, rather than towards us. VideoAt the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece, Covid origin likely China lab incident - FBI chief, Blackpink lead top stars back on the road in Asia, Exploring the rigging claims in Nigeria's elections, 'Wales is in England' gaffe sparks TikToker's trip, Ukraine war casts shadow over India's G20 ambitions, Record numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. 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. The video is spectacular. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. Lets go home, Dixon said. 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. At a conference in Drogheda at the weekend, BNFL invited the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland to review the analysis, and we will be taking up this invitation without delay. The waste comes in on rails. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. Bomb disposal experts were called to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant after a routine audit of chemicals stored in a laboratory. 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. Thorps legacy will be the highly radioactive sludge it leaves behind: the final three per cent of waste it cant reprocess. Some of these structures are growing, in the industrys parlance, intolerable, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. 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. 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. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. 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 highly radioactive fuel is then transferred next door into an even bigger pool where its stored and cooled for between three and five years. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. Then it is vitrified: mixed with three parts glass beads and a little sugar, until it turns into a hot block of dirty-brown glass. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. When records couldnt be found, Sellafield staff conducted interviews with former employees. NORAD shits its collective pants 3. The process will cost at least 121bn. Any pathogens within the phlegm will be easily neutralised by . Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. Theyd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. 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