what would happen if sellafield exploded

The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. The air was pure Baltic brine. You dont want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions, Atherton said. "A notable example of a potential radiological weapon for an enemy of the UK is the B215 facility at Sellafield. The flask is then removed, washed, cleaned and tested before being returned to the sender. 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. (modern), Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site. 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 told me I had a lung burden and that was an accumulation from the 30-odd years I'd worked at Sellafield. The book includes interviews with Sellafield foremen, scientists, managers, farmers, labourers, anti-nuclear activists, the vicar, the MP and bank manager, policemen, physicists, welders and accountants. 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. Those who were working there didn't want to be seen against the thing," says Mary Johnson, now in her 90s, who was bornon the farm that was compulsorily purchased to become the site of Sellafield. The reprocessing plants end was always coming. 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. The spot where we stood on the road, he said, is probably the most hazardous place in Europe. Every family has someone who worked there or has somehow benefited from it. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. 7.2K 573K views 5 years ago What If The Sun Exploded? 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. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? The waste comes in on rails. Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. The Hacking of ChatGPT Is Just Getting Started. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. ny time spent in Sellafield is scored to a soundtrack of alarms and signals. 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 Commons defence committee in its report said that "attention has particularly focused on perceived vulnerability of nuclear installations". In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. So in a couple of thousand years the Earth and the Solar System would be enveloped in hot, highly ionized gas. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. The UK is currently home to 112 tonnes of what is the most toxic substance ever created - and most of it is held in a modern grey building to one side of the site. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. He was right, but only in theory. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. 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 species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time. It will cost 5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. 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 place was set up very much like a War Department settlement. Just like in 1957. 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. But some folk could laugh it off. Game adaptations after him will have to try harder. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. 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. (Cement is an excellent shield against radiation. No. 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. Watch. Compared to the longevity of nuclear waste, Sellafield has only been around for roughly the span of a single lunch break within a human life. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. This glass is placed into a waste container and welded shut. 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. Where the waste goes next is controversial. It recklessly dumped contaminated water out to sea and filled old mines with radioactive waste. More than 140 tonnes of plutonium are stored in giant. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasnt to blame. The rods arrived at Sellafield by train, stored in cuboid flasks with corrugated sides, each weighing about 50 tonnes and standing 1.5 metres tall. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. 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. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. 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. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. Video, 00:01:07Police form chain to save woman trapped in sinking car. The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Endoscopes are poked through lead-clad walls before robotic demolition machines and master-slave arms are installed to break up and safely store the waste. The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. 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. 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. My relationship began at 13 when I went to school at St Bees, just three miles away. Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site podcast, Hinkley Point: the dreadful deal behind the worlds most expensive power plant, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. The missiles with proximity fuses generally detonate when they come within a certain distance of their target. To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. 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. For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. 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. 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. It was a historic occasion. We power-walked past nonetheless. 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. It would have . Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. Video, 00:01:13, Baby meets father for first time after Sudan escape, Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row. In 1947, the Sellafield site opened with a single mission - the production of plutonium, a radioactive chemical element for use in Britain's nuclear deterrent. Correction: we mixed up the Sun's lifespan with its age. 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. Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Western Europe, reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, splitting it into plutonium, uranium and waste. Well, from the interviews with Raaz, Reed and former Sellafield boss Barry Snelson, there isn't any. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. But how did Sellafield become Europe's nuclear dustbin and the target of so much hostility to nuclear power? 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. 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. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. A super-massive black hole couldn't explode. 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. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. Can Sellafield be bombed? What would happen if Sellafield exploded? You see, an explosion usually inflicts damage in two major ways . 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.

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