How high will the sea rise? Spent fuel rods and radioactive pieces of metal rest in skips, which in turn are submerged in open, rectangular ponds, where water cools them and absorbs their radiation. On one floor, we stopped to look at a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV a steamer trunk-sized thing with a yellow carapace, floating in the algal-green water. In March 2015 work began to pump 1,500 cubic metres of radioactive sludge from the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond, enough to fill seven double-decker buses. "I used to get very cross with their housing policy. It will be finished a century or so from now. It has its own railway station and, until September 11, 2001, its visitor centre was a major tourist attraction visited by an average of 1,000 people per day. 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. You see the little arm at the end of it? Cassidy said. Constructed in 1962 and shuttered in 1981, the golf ball wasnt built with decommissioning in mind. Two shuttles run clockwise and counterclockwise, ferrying employees between buildings. If the alarm falls silent, it means the criticality alarm has stopped working. The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. Can Sellafield be bombed? This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. Why Do Few Missiles Explode Before Hitting The Target? - Science ABC Now it needs to clean-up Sellafield houses more than 1,000 nuclear facilities on its six. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? In a van, we went down a steep, dark ramp for a quarter of an hour until we reached Onkalos lowest level, and here I caught the acrid odour of a closed space in which heavy machinery has run for a long time. Every second, on each of the plants four floors, I heard a beep a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. 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. In one image a seagull can be seen bobbing on the water. Depending on the direction of the wind, cities like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Leeds would be well within fallout range, as would be Dublin. The snake hasnt been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand. Someday it will happen and when it does, what can we expect? For Sellafield, the politics are almost as complex as the clean-up operation. 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. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? Though the inside is highly radioactive, the shielding means you can walk right up to the boxes. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. 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. 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 facility, which opened in 1994, is due to close permanently in 2018. Some plastic drums are crushed into smaller pucks, placed into bigger drums and filled with grout. Video, 00:00:33, Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? The decommissioning programme is laden with assumptions and best guesses, Bowman told me. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. 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. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. 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. 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. Sellafield: 'It was all contaminated: milk, chickens, the golf course The huge risk of contamination means human exposure cant be risked. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. 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. Dixons team was running out of spare parts that arent manufactured any more. The document ran to 17,000 pages. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. It wasnt. Management, profligate with money, was criminally careless with safety and ecology. Inside Sellafield, the UK's most dangerous nuclear site - WIRED UK New technologies, for instance, and new buildings to replace the intolerable ones, and new reserves of money. Sellafield is home to 80% of the UK's nuclear waste and some of the world's most hazardous buildings. Sellafields isolated location, perched on the Cumbrian coast looking over to the Isle of Man, is also a slow death-warrant; the salty, corrosive sea air plays a lethal game of cat and mouse with the sites ageing infrastructure. Leaked images of the ponds from 2014 show them in an alarming state of disrepair, riddled with cracks and rust. 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. This giant storage pool is the size of two football fields, eight metres deep and kept at a constant 20C. Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, England. 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. And here, over roughly 20m years, the uranium and other bits of space dust and debris cohered to form our planet in such a way that the violent tectonics of the young Earth pushed the uranium not towards its hot core but up into the folds of its crust. Dr Thompson said that the buildings designed in the 1950s could not withstand a crash from an airliner. Yellow circles denote full flasks, black are empty. The lab operated in the 1970s and produced the Plutonium-238 used in early cardiac pacemakers and as a primary fuel source for Nasas deep space missions where solar energy isnt available. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. It would have been like Chernobyl there was contamination everywhere, on the golf course, in the milk, in chickens but it was quickly forgotten about," says McManus. Video, 00:05:44Ros Atkins breaks down the BBC chairman loan row, One-minute World News. 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. As well as the threat of a bomb, missile or hijacked plane hitting Sellafield, Dr Thompson raises the possibility of a rogue worker or terrorist infiltrator at Sellafield sabotaging the cooling equipment which prevents the stored waste from boiling and causing a massive radioactive release. Then, having driven through a high-security gate, youre surrounded by towering chimneys, pipework, chugging cooling plants, everything dressed in steampunk. We power-walked past nonetheless. 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 popular centre, operated by BNFL, was officially opened in 1988 by Prince Philip and went on to become one of West Cumbria's biggest tourist attractions. Sellafield is one of the most contaminated industrial sites in Europe. Video, 00:00:33Watch: Flames engulf key bank in Sudan's capital, Drone captures moment lost child is found. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. What would happen if Sellafield exploded? But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. 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.