what would happen if sellafield exploded

Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. 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. 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. This facility houses 21 steel tanks and associated equipment in above ground concrete cells. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. 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. Read about our approach to external linking. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. This was Britain's worst-ever nuclear accident, but no one was evacuated, no iodine pills were distributed, work went on and most people were not even told about thefire. "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. 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. Video, 00:00:33Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. 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. Its an existential threat to link-in-bio companies. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. Crab Supernova Explosion [1080p] Watch on. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. 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. 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. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. This article was amended on 16 December 2022. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. "It's all about the politics," Davey argues. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. On April 20, 2005 Sellafield workers found a huge leak at Thorp, which first started in July 2004. 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. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? Can you visit Sizewell B? 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. Theres currently enough high and intermediate level radioactive waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. And that put the frighteners on us because we had small children. This cycle, from acid to powder, lasted up to 36 hours, Dixon said and it hadnt improved a jot in efficiency in the years shed been there. Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. "I used to get very cross with their housing policy. Video, 00:00:49Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout, Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. Here's a look at the technology being used in the clean-up operation. What Could Happen-Radiation? A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. The area includes as far south as Walney, east as Bowness and north almost to the Scottish border. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. Meta is finally allowing people to add more links to their Instagram profiles. "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. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. The process of getting suited up and into the room takes so much time that workers only spend around 90 minutes a day in contaminated areas. 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. Dixons father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. Now it needs to clean-up. The day I visited Sellafield was the UKs hottest ever. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? But how did Sellafield become Europe's nuclear dustbin and the target of so much hostility to nuclear power? Sellafield says vitrification ensures safe medium-to-long-term storage, but even glass degrades over time. At one spot, our trackers went mad. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. 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. 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 generationsand people caught in the fall-out would have a greatly increased chance of getting cancer. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. 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. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. Each two-metre square box weighs up to 50 tonnes and contains around 100 sieverts of radiation. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. 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. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. The stories, edited by Hunter Davies, suggest that much of what happened then is inconceivable now. Once sufficiently cooled, the spent fuel is moved by canal to Sellafields Head End Shear Cave where it is chopped up, dropped into a basket and dissolved in nitric acid. . There are four so-called legacy ponds and silo facilities at Sellafield, all containing highly contaminated waste. The site currently handles nearly all the radioactive waste generated by the UKs 15 operational nuclear reactors. 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. Video, 00:01:15Schoolboy, 13, stops bus after driver passes out, Baby grabs Kate's handbag during royal walkabout. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. 2023 BBC. 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. (modern). What would happen if Sellafield exploded? 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. Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Crumbling, near-derelict buildings are home to decades worth of accumulated radioactive waste - a toxic legacy from the early years of the nuclear age. 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. Scientists believe lasting symptoms following a coronavirus infection is not a single disorder. 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. Working 10-hour days, four days a week in air-fed suits, staff are tasked with cleaning every speck of dust and dirt until the room has been fully decontaminated. 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. Once cooled, it forms a solid block of glass. 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. 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 . Now I look back and think, no, we caused that," says McManus. When you asked, 'How many would you expect in a community of 2,000 people?' Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. 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. Of course the sun is only about 4.6 billion years old, half way through its lifespan of about 10 bil. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world.

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