The 1986b Chernobyl meltdown generated a blast the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs when a reactor exploded and burned. "It's so political that science doesn't matter. The room on the screens is littered with rubbish and smashed up bits of equipment. 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. We power-walked past nonetheless. No, I am not anti-nuclear, but my goodness, I think they could have made a better fist of it if they'd tried harder," he says. What emerges is the intimate, honest, sometimes ugly story of how a wartime bomb factory was dumped in one of Britain's most cut-off areas, turned to producing plutonium for the atom bomb, then nuclear electricity and is now a American-led multinational corporation decommissioning the mess that it largely created. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. 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. One retired worker, who now lives in nearby Seascale, thought there might be a dropped fuel rod in one of the glove boxes a rumour that turned out to be false. 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. 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. It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. It feels like the most manmade place in the world. 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. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. The radiation trackers clipped to our protective overalls let off soft cheeps, their frequency varying as radioactivity levels changed around us. What If Betelgeuse Exploded Right Now? - YouTube 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? "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. Material housed here will remain radioactive for 100,000 years. New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. 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. Its anatomy is made up of accordion folds, so it can stretch and compress on command. 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. That would contaminate fisheries and travel north on currents, making fishing in western Scotland impossible. Video, 00:05:44Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, One-minute World News. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridges length off Finlands south-west coast. The towers of blocks are spaced to allow you to walk between them, but reach the end and youre in total darkness. The less you know about it the less you can tell anyone else.". It was a historic occasion. 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. 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. Is Sellafield worse than Chernobyl? A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. Standing in a tiny control room crammed with screens and a control desk, Davey points to a grainy video feed on a CRT monitor. In January 2012 Cumbria County Council rejected an application to carry out detailed geological surveys in boroughs near Sellafield. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. No. 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 . It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. A 2,000-mile high pillar of cloud has formed on Saturn and scientists believe the planet may explode in the near future. The Commons defence committee in its report said that "attention has particularly focused on perceived vulnerability of nuclear installations". What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? 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 short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. 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. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. On April 20, 2005 Sellafield workers found a huge leak at Thorp, which first started in July 2004. This has been corrected. When they arrived over the years, during the heyday of reprocessing, the skips were unloaded into pools so haphazardly that Sellafield is now having to build an underwater map of what is where, just to know best how to get it all out. An operator uses the arm to sort and pack contaminated materials into 500-litre plastic drums, a form of interim storage. All rights reserved. WIRED was not given access to these facilities, but Sellafield asserts they are constantly monitored and in a better condition than previously. 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. 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. "Typical nuclear, we over-engineer everything, Edmondson says, taking out a dosimeter and sliding it nonchalantly along the face of one box. Inside Sellafield, the UK's most dangerous nuclear site - WIRED UK The bunker mentality has eased and the safety systems are better. Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, Inside the most dangerous parts of Sellafield. Terror attack on Sellafield 'would wipe out the north' - The Guardian Those officers will soon be trained at a new 39 million firearms base at Sellafield. At one point, when we were walking through the site, a member of the Sellafield team pointed out three different waste storage facilities within a 500-metre radius. The air was pure Baltic brine. Jeremy Hunt wants nuclear power classed as sustainable: is it? It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. I still get lost sometimes here, said Sanna Mustonen, a geologist with Posiva, even after all these years. After Onkalo takes in all its waste, these caverns will be sealed up to the surface with bentonite, a kind of clay that absorbs water, and that is often found in cat litter. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way. 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 . 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. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. The missiles with proximity fuses generally detonate when they come within a certain distance of their target. However, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday that a "quick response" procedure was in place to cover the whole of the country in the event of a hijack attack. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs dripped out of a ruptured pipe. Below us, submerged in water, lay decades worth of intermediate-level waste not quite as radioactive as spent fuel rods, but more harmful than low-level paper towels. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. During this process, some of the uranium atoms, randomly but very usefully, absorb darting neutrons, yielding heavier atoms of plutonium: the stuff of nuclear weapons. 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. A near-Earth supernova is an explosion resulting from the death of a star that occurs close enough to the Earth (roughly less than 10 to 300 parsecs (30 to 1000 light-years) away) to have noticeable effects on Earth's biosphere.. An estimated 20 supernova explosions have happened within 300 pc of the Earth over the last 11 million years.