NORAD shits its collective pants 3. Sellafield is so big it has its own bus service. Four decades on, not a single GDF has begun to operate anywhere in the world. Sellafields waste comes in different forms and potencies. We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. Read about our approach to external linking. But working out exactly what is in each laboratory has proven complicated. Theres no fuel coming in. I dont think its really hit the team just yet.. Read about our approach to external linking. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly materialising solar system. Fill a water bottle one-third full of vinegar. In Indonesia, sickness and pollution plague a sprawling factory complex that supplies the world with crucial battery materials. 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. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. It took four decades just to decide the location of Finlands GDF. An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. The countryside around is quiet, the roads deserted. 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. Structures that will eventually be dismantled piece-by-piece look close to collapse but they cant fall down. The best way to neutralise its threat is to move it into a subterranean vault, of the kind the UK plans to build later this century. Thank you for calling the BT emergency radiation leak reporting centre. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. Sellafield is the largest nuclear site in Europe and the most complicated nuclear site in the world. But making safe what is left behind is an almost unimaginably expensive and complex task that requires us to think not on a human timescale, but a planetary one. Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea. 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. 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. A popular phrase in the nuclear waste industry goes: When in doubt, grout.) Even the paper towel needs a couple of hundred years to shed its radioactivity and become safe, though. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. A 10-storey building called B204 had been Sellafields first reprocessing facility, but in 1973, a rogue chemical reaction filled the premises with radioactive gas. It took two years and 5m to develop this instrument. It will be finished a century or so from now. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock. It was perfectly safe, my guide assured me. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes. At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once its removed. 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. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Sellafield took its present name only in 1981, in part to erase the old name, Windscale, and the associated memories of the fire. Every month one of 13 easy-to-access boxes is lifted onto a platform and inspected on all sides for signs of damage and leakage. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after theyd ended their life cycles. Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. The hot, compressed oxygen explodes in a runaway . The clean-up operation is arduous the Magnox pond isnt expected to be decommissioned until 2054. In Taryl's final installment of 2020's Halloween how-to series, we bring you "The Glob". At one spot, our trackers went mad. Sellafield Ltd's head of corporate communications, Emma Law, takes you inside Sellafield. Once radiation arrives, the national network of radiation monitoring stations, supplemented by mobile monitoring units of the Defence Forces and Civil Defence, will enable movement of the radiation cloud to be tracked and radiation levels in each area to be quantified. Many of us put our phones and laptop charging during the night. A dose of between 4.5 and six is considered deadly. o take apart an ageing nuclear facility, you have to put a lot of other things together first. How will the rock bear up if, in the next ice age, tens of thousands of years from today, a kilometre or two of ice forms on the surface? fully-fuelled aircraft could directly impact on the highest-risk plants at the site without resulting in the release to the atmosphere of a very large quantity of radioactivity. Waste can travel incognito, to fatal effect: radioactive atoms carried by the wind or water, entering living bodies, riddling them with cancer, ruining them inside out. Sellafields presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. It is understood to be the Government's intention that very shortly iodine tablets will be available to everybody to keep in their home, with reserve supplies also being held in key locations throughout the country. Put a funnel in the neck of a balloon, and hold onto the balloon neck and funnel. The reprocessing plants end was always coming. 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. It is these two sites, known as First Generation Magnox Storage Pond and the Magnox Swarf Storage Silos, that are referred to as the most hazardous in Western Europe. 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. 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 outside of the container is decontaminated before it is moved to Sellafields huge vitrified product store, an air-cooled facility currently home to 6,000 containers. Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. 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. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. Standing in the oldest part of the Sellafield site, the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo has stored nuclear waste in its water-filled chambers for the last 60 years. Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientists intricate delirium. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. 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. Saw one explode from across the street. So it was like: OK, thats it? This stopped operating before I was born and back then there was a Cold War mentality, he says. How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? To put that into perspective, between five and 10 kilograms of plutonium is enough to make a nuclear weapon. 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 pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. (The sugar reduces the wastes volatility. The UK governments dilemma is by no means unique. About 9,000 people are employed at the Sellafield site The estimated cost of cleaning up the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria has risen by almost 2.5bn in a year, a report has. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. And so they must be maintained and kept standing. However, many feel worried if it will blow up or overheat as a full charge usually takes 2-3 hours tops. Your call is important to us. 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. 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. In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six square kilometre site, Sellafield has its own train station, police force and fire service, Some buildings at Sellafield date back to the late-1950s when the UK was racing to build its first nuclear bomb, Low and intermediate-level radioactive waste is temporarially being stored in 50-tonne concrete blocks, Much of Sellafield's decomissioning work is done by robots to protect humans from deadly levels of radiation, The cavernous Thorp facility reprocesses spent nuclear fuel from the UK and overseas, Cumbria County Council rejected an application. The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good maintenance and simulations to trust their weapons work. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. 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