Sellafield Nuclear Site Has Leak That Could Pose Risk To Public (theguardian.com) 71
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sellafield, Europe's most hazardous nuclear site, has a worsening leak from a huge silo of radioactive waste that could pose a risk to the public, the Guardian can reveal. Concerns over safety at the crumbling building, as well as cracks in a reservoir of toxic sludge known as B30, have caused diplomatic tensions with countries including the US, Norway and Ireland, which fear Sellafield has failed to get a grip of the problems. The leak of radioactive liquid from one of the "highest nuclear hazards in the UK" -- a decaying building at the vast Cumbrian site known as the Magnox swarf storage Silo (MSSS) -- is likely to continue to 2050. That could have "potentially significant consequences" if it gathers pace, risking contaminating groundwater, according to an official document. Cracks have also developed in the concrete and asphalt skin covering the huge pond containing decades of nuclear sludge, part of a catalogue of safety problems at the site. These concerns have emerged in Nuclear Leaks, a year-long Guardian investigation into problems spanning cyber hacking, radioactive contamination and toxic workplace culture at the vast nuclear dump. "We are proud of our safety record at Sellafield and we are always striving to improve," said a Sellafield spokesperson in a statement. "The nature of our site means that until we complete our mission, our highest hazard facilities will always pose a risk. We continuously measure and report on nuclear, radiological, and conventional safety. Employees are empowered to raise issues and challenge when things aren't right."
Pictures (Score:5, Informative)
This article actually has pictures of the "sludge" in the "pond" in question: https://www.theguardian.com/bu... [theguardian.com]
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Oh, I would have called that 'water' in a 'pool' but I don't speak British.
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I think the sludge is the stuff under the water, and we'd call it a pool too, at least ordinary people would; I assume "pond" here is some site- or industry-specific euphemism.
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It's a pretty common industrial term to call any large shallow body of water a pond regardless of whether it's actually what a layman might call a pond (contained by the shape of the landscape and gravity) or something more like an above-ground pool.
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Re:Pictures (Score:4, Interesting)
"Dirty 30" as it is known has been a problem for decades. It's open to the elements and birds regularly come in, carrying off radioactive material.
Thing is, it's located in the North of England, and the further north you go the less interest most governments have in funding anything you need, like nuclear waste clean-up.
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Yep this is the same place where they shoot and indefinitely store the corpses of all the birds that land and thus become radioactive waste materials themselves...can't let the radioactive waste fly away!
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
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Which is why I've argued - since years BS (Before Slashdot) - that the only safe place for an underground nuclear waste repository is in the London Clay (as a geologist, I can make a decent argument for this on purely geological grounds) with the entrance passing through the Houses of Parliament. The latter point would mean that any leaks would first and foremost kill or injure politicians wh
Stellafield ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Damn! Looks like we're going to have to change the name again.
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If asked for a second, "Hiroshima", "Fukushima", and "Chernobyl" would probably rank higher than "Dounreay" in the popular mind.
I always knew I didn't like Seinfeld! (Score:1)
And now I know why! It was just a coverup for nuclear waste! SAD!
Kinda lacking information (Score:3)
The only relevant piece amid a lot of ancient history and other "investigations", unrelated to the headline is this:
Sellafield, Europe’s most hazardous nuclear site, has a worsening leak from a huge silo of radioactive waste that could pose a risk to the public, the Guardian can reveal.
What is leaking, how much of it and to where remains a mystery.
So, not much to go on. But I got it - we should be very afraid. Apparently, the staff over there is:
One former longstanding employee says that, despite the cracks, the contents of the ponds are gradually improving: “I have seen it at its worst. The water quality was horrendous; you could stand on the roof and look down and not see a single thing in there. He adds: “[Decommissioning Sellafield] is the biggest job in nuclear and there is no blueprint. It’s a dream and a nightmare job. There has been real progress – every skip that comes out makes it safer and reduces the hazard risk.”
In summary, the dumps generated by plutonium breeding during the arms race of the 60s and the 70s, the refusal to reprocess for fears of "proliferation" (which happened anyway by direct export or stealing) and the lack of adequate planning did, unsurprisingly, make shit more expensive later on.
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In 2019, Sellafield reported a leak from the storage unit to the ONR. The leak significantly worsened over the next two years, and a previously unreported document reveals that 2.3-2.5 cubic metres of radioactive “liquor” has been leaking from the facility every day. This liquid is a soup of radioactive magnesium alloy filings dissolved into water, from waste cladding that encased spent Magnox nuclear fuel.
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Ok, so likely AL80, still not enough information to assess how radioactive the "soup" could be, not without spending half a day on looking up shit. They could have quoted the document.
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But that likely wouldn't be scary enough for the Guardian readership. Or possibly even understandable to them.
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From the article(s) there (I read them both), the impression I got was this is really more about a energy-supply problem in 1974. There was a miner's strike, so the coal power plants were down, and nuclear plants were turned up to 11 because politicians were worried about bad things happening while they were the ones on the job.
This caused a large increase in waste fuel rods, more than the reprocessing facility there could handle. The rods stayed in what was supposed to be a temporary storage pool too long
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Yep.
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As a USAian, here I can honestly say, our 'leadership' is never capable of thinking beyond the next election and has no idea how to solve any problems...
Yes, this is the most frustrating thing about the environmental mitigation measures being proposed now. They are always setting goal dates of 2035 or later. We can't really drag out some of this stuff that long (and that's assuming everyone's still on board after the next election, or the one after). Change needs to be starting in earnest now setting a goal more than a decade away just guarantees everyone will drag their heels for the next 5 years and then they will claim the milestone is not reachable and
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If the nuclear material is leaking out of the ponds, then no doubt the ponds are improving.
But what about the places where the water is leaking to? It typically will seek aquifers.
the refusal to reprocess for fears of "proliferation"
Sellafield was (among other things) a reprocessing site. Which you could have learned by simply skimming the Wikipedia article. But you didn't. Instead, you chose to write the comment you wrote. Why?
Usual Guardian Bollocks (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't wipe my arse with anything printed in the Guardian. It is anti-nuclear be it weapons or power generation. It's happy to support the benefits of nuclear isotopes generated in reactors for therapy use in the NHS though.
As for the toxic radiation plume - how exactly is that going to happen ? The waste is held under water. There are no reactors there to have a catastrophic explosion with material spreading anything high into the atmosphere.
It's no secret that Sellafield is aging and it has a legacy to clean up that will take many decades, it's been covered many times before.
But comparing it to Chernobyl is lazy, scaremongering journalism.
Oh and number of people killed or maimed or who suffered damage in the Windscale fire in the 1950s : zero. There have been projections of deaths due to emissions of the fire but they are purely statistical in nature and would not even register in cancer death numbers.
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Should we assume you are unaware of the fact that a plume can occur in water as well as air? One of Ontario's nuclear generating plants regularly releases water that has been used for cooling, creating a heat plume that affects the ecology of the lake where the venting occurs.
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A heat plume is: warmer water.
Not radioactive water. It's warmer than the life in that area tends to like.
Perhaps they should cool it a bit...
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I was just explaining to our friend above that a plume isn't simply airborne (in this case) pollution. You're right about the Pickering plant. People have tried to get them to cool the water a bit before releasing it. They've also had a couple of radioactive leaks/plumes, but the contaminants had a short half life, and the concentration was very low.
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Those aren't suitable - you can't tell when your arse is clean by looking at the paper.
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> which paper would you trust? Daily Mail/Express/Sun?
The Times obviously
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I wouldn't wipe my arse with anything printed in the Guardian. It is anti-nuclear be it weapons or power generation.
So what are you opposed to? Their rationality? Their ability to do maths?
There have been projections of deaths due to emissions of the fire but they are purely statistical in nature and would not even register in cancer death numbers.
https://news.cancerresearchuk.... [cancerresearchuk.org]
Re:Usual Guardian Bollocks (Score:5, Informative)
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It's more their propensity for focusing on certain facts, and figures and disregarding others to bolster their viewpoint.
The Guardian is not a science magazine. If their audience was all scientists then your objection would be rational. Since it is not, it is nonsensical. They have to write articles in a way that makes them understandable by the general public. If you know better, then you're capable of finding a more primary source and reading the source material, and you should do that.
"a dream and a nightmare job" (Score:1)
I'm kinda amused the toxic environment at the site even extends to the metaphorical level.
For a moment I thought my data leaked again! (Score:2)
But luckily this is no data leak.
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> But luckily this is no data leak.
No - they've got that too: https://www.cshub.com/attacks/... [cshub.com]
That site is rotten from top to bottom - and they know it. Just about everything except the gateposts needs some sort of maintenance or renewal. It's been under-invested for a long time because it's expensive, and can't be seen to be a drag on the country's finances because "nuclear good".
FWIW, nuclear needs to be in everyone's energy mix, I just wish we'd be honest about what it costs. Same goes for fossil fue
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Re: For a moment I thought my data leaked again! (Score:2)
We can all have cell phones if they are designed to be serviced and have a longer support window so they aren't so wasteful.
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If "nuclear good" was true, the proposed power stations would have been approved in 2010 and be on-stream by now. We also would have reduced gas imports so wouldn't have cared much if anything happened to NordStream or has prices thanks to a certain Russian president's "military operations".
Instead we have "nuclear bad, we'll just let the populace pay through the nose to foreign companies for their energy. Why, yes, I am a shareholder, since you ask".
The dark side of nuclear power (Score:3)
When it works, it works great! When something fails, it fails spectacularly.
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When it works, it works great! When something fails, it fails spectacularly.
Yeah but there's a difference between 'something unexpected happened' and 'politicians have buried heads for decades to avoid dealing with this'. The UK is remarkable in its ability to shove difficult issues into the future to get quick profits now. Outside of London it repeatedly avoids investing in things that would provide long term benefits, and it then wonders why there has been practically zero productivity growth outside of London for decades. I rode the new Crossrail train a few weeks back, and it i
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The UK is hardly remarkable here. It just got a head start, on most of the West, by a couple decades.
Then in the early-middle 90's after the first-world had finally begun to have some serious discussion about structural problems all over the place, the cold war ended and everyone convinced themselves the 'peace dividend' was going to pay for everything... It was all moon beams no matter what side the political spectrum you say on until that 'hockey-stick' climate BS started flowing, and then everyone prom
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You need to look into the current state of the Hanfield reactor. Or the US attempts to find a place to store nuclear waste.
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But it only fails when idiots from failed states like the USSR are running it!
And Japan... And the United Kingdom. France has had a few serious accidents too.
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So you mean, every country that has nuclear power is run by idiots? I agree, that's a pretty safe bet. None of them want to spend the money required to truly safeguard nuclear waste, for example, as illustrated by this story.
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Naaa, it _never_ fails! We will have at max 1 really bad accident in 100'000 years! Since we already have had 4 of those (that we know of), we are perfectly safe for the next 500'000 years!
is this an 3 mile island? chernobyl? fukushima? (Score:2)
is this an 3 mile island? chernobyl? fukushima?
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It's more of a Hanford. Maybe not as bad as Hanford but it's close enough.
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Like Stellafield, the worst problem is radioactive sludge. This leaked from tanks and has been contaminating ground water, and could possibly enter the Columbia river if not stopped. A new leak was detected in 20
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Yeah, but you could say the same about Sellafield. This sludge is radioactive magnesium alloy from the cladding on MAGNOX fuel rods. The reason it's turned into unmanageable sludge is that the fuel rods were left in spent fuel pools far longer than they should have been. They were only supposed to be left there temporarily to let the most radioactive fission byproducts decay to a safe level. Due to lack of funds and mismanagement, they were left there for far too long, and the cladding corroded and turn
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None of those are comparable.
Well you could compare the success of Fukashima vs the idiocy surrounding Chernobyl
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Read up on it, it could have been MUCH worse than that Chernobyl or Fukushima..
Three Mile Island never had any significant releases outside of its Containment, so really not even on the same playing field.
"and we are always striving to improve" (Score:2)
In other words, give us an open cheque book and we'll take another life time "managing it".
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hack? (Score:2)
is this only coming out because Sellafield was hacked and they're being proactive since russia will just publish it now?
You know the UK has turned into a 3d world country (Score:5, Informative)
when Norway officials consider offering help.
That's what developed Europe did when they paid for the new dome over the Chernobyl reactor, because the Ukraine was skint and couldn't pay for it. The UK is basically being put in the same spot as the Ukraine by another rich country. That don't look great does it?
From TLA:
A senior Norwegian diplomat told the Guardian that they believed Oslo should offer to help fund the site so that it can be run more safely, rather than âoerun something so dangerous on a shoestring budget and without transparencyâ.
Re:You know the UK has turned into a 3d world coun (Score:4, Interesting)
The UK isn't poor. It's ranked 6th in nominal GDP, far ahead of Norway & Ireland. 40% of the world's 'dark money' passes through the City of London's opaque global banking system (one of the last remnants of the British Empire) so it's not like they can't afford to keep Sellafield safe, it's more like the money launderers & tax evaders would be most displeased if they were asked to pay for it. So the electorate has to pay for it, as well as record profits to corporations for their energy bills, rents, & general cost of living hikes.
Essentially, what's happening to society in the UK is that the govt have successively removed/disestablished the protections that are supposed to cushion them from the extremes of raw, neoliberal capitalism, e.g. universal healthcare, social services, public education, etc., & left them to fend for themselves. What we're witnessing is the disestablishment of social democracy. One of the key ideologies used to push this through is "fiscal conservatism", which erroneously conflates micro-economics with macro-economics; you frequently hear talk of national debts & not spending more than you're taking in taxes, as if they were micro-economics, which simply isn't how national, macro-economics works.
Re:You know the UK has turned into a 3d world coun (Score:5, Insightful)
The UK is a very poor country, with a lot of rich people. The UN has been berating us for breaking international law on child poverty, with levels now twice the rate of the next worse developed nation (Iceland, for some reason).
The Tories have basically sold off all the public property, and then asset stripped everything else, and plundered all the public funds. They say we have no money because we had to pay for the COVID response, but countless billions of that were simply stolen by them. As an example, £37 billion was spent on the Test and Trace system, most of which went to Tory donors and friends, and which has no measurable effect on the spread of the virus. Billions were given to cronies for PPE, much of which was useless and had to be disposed off by burning or in landfill.
It's truly staggering to see the scale of how much the UK has lost to Tory ideology and corruption. Naturally, they are now blaming immigrants and benefit cheats for the poverty they forced on us.
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when Norway officials consider offering help.
That's what developed Europe did when they paid for the new dome over the Chernobyl reactor, because the Ukraine was skint and couldn't pay for it. The UK is basically being put in the same spot as the Ukraine by another rich country. That don't look great does it?
From TLA:
A senior Norwegian diplomat told the Guardian that they believed Oslo should offer to help fund the site so that it can be run more safely, rather than âoerun something so dangerous on a shoestring budget and without transparencyâ.
This will be considered a highlight if Brexit goes on much longer.
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BRExit will be going on for a long time yet. The EU will not accept Britain back in on the terms they had before they left.
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Besides, when Britain starts negotiating to re-enter Europe, it will be a considerably smaller economy (compared to the EU it is trying to join) than it was in the early 1970s. Of course it won't be able to negotiate as good a deal as the one it tore up.
Changing to the â (does Slashcode accept Euros? Yet? No.) as a pre-requisite for starting negotiations would be a likely ante.
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> I mean look at their artists impression "graphic" as to how long it would take for a
> cloud of "radiation" to get to Norway. Totally unofficial
"Source: Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, Norwegian Meteorological Institute and Norwegian University of Life Sciences."
As the graphic clearly notes, this is showing how long a leak would take to hit Norway, which is what Norway is complaining about - not a leak per se, but the lack of any reporting system and the continuing failure on the pa
Proud? (Score:1)
But no CO2, so what's the problem? (Score:2)
CO2 is the most dangerous thing on the planet and it will destroy everything b/c climate change !!!
Also the leak is like sequestering the radioactive material in the earth and sequestering is totally fine. So we could learn from this about how to sequester the deadly CO2.
win-win
Europe? (Score:1)