Brought back a lot of memories from when I visited as a kid and is quite an eye opener to the legacy that we have been left with and will be passing onto hundreds of future generations.

In case you missed it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b065x080/britains-nuclear-secrets-inside-sellafield

Yes I saw this. Scary as hell and it makes you wonder how many other moumental cockups have been brushed under the carpet for future generations to discover.

Anybody interested in Chernobyl will enjoy Elena Filatova’s website:

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

This:

and this:

Make for fascinating and somewhat sobering reading. But if anything they don’t put me off nuclear power (nuclear weapons, maybe), just the idea of putting humans in charge of it.

Yeh, pretty mad the stuff they did there, without a care in the world about how we were gonna clean it all up. No wonder it’s gonna cost us so much money (partly due to the fact we no longer have the cavalier approach like BITD, otherwise it’d be done quicker but far less safely).

I remember handling one of those glass puck dummies when I was there thinking how amazing it was that they could do this and store the “small quantities” of waste…now I realise just how much waste and how much a problem it really is. Burying something inside your own facility and constantly monitoring it shouts “oh flip, oh flip, oh flip, what have we produced?”

Maybe they should store it under the houses of parliament and use a GSHP to heat the building nice and cheaply. Would be a nice reminder to the ministers to think of the planet and the future when deciding our energy policy.

The other thing is how much energy are we going to have to use to dispose of the waste? There was an old statistic of a wind turbine only just being able to pay back the CO2 used to produce it by the end of it’s life (should be a lot better now) but by the time you use all that concrete and steel to make a nuclear power station and then have to use all that energy to dispose and handle the waste, especially if someday they have to split up the waste atoms to speed up it’s decay.

I used to be a fan of nuclear until Fukushima when I switched to feeling that it is just not worth the risk.

You know I’ve never really understood why the Nuclear power industry is seen as such a bogey man. Looking at Fukushima the likely effects world wide are pretty limited.

A June 2012 Stanford University study estimated, using a linear no-threshold model, that the radioactivity release from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could cause 130 deaths from cancer globally (the lower bound for the estimate being 15 and the upper bound 1100) and 199 cancer cases in total (the lower bound being 24 and the upper bound 1800), most of which are estimated to occur in Japan. Radiation exposure to workers at the plant was projected to result in 2 to 12 deaths.

On a worldwide basis that really isn’t very bad. We’ve had worse industrial disasters in the UK but I don’t see anyone using that as an excuse to stop producing oil and gas.

We’ve had worse industrial disasters in the UK

Totally agree.

Even with the modern engineering and techniques there are still fatalities in the offshore world. One “trick” the UK HSE does is to count any helicopter incidents or diving accidents when compiling statistics for the North Sea. They are covered by other statistics.

Even offshore wind has had fatal accidents and lots of serious injuries.

On the subject of wind turbine related deaths, I see the report has been updated:

http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf

So the “Nuclear” industry is scary, because there are a few hundred thousand tonnes of low level waste produced over the last 60 years.

Er, the oil industry isn’t exactly clean you know!

I’m going to suggest that using oil has been worse for the environment than using nuclear power?

Statistically, hydro electric power is the least safe energy provider, if you divide deaths by KwHrs produced. Largely down to a single incident in 1975 that killed 171,000 (!!!) people……

Banqiao_Dam_disaster

Never heard of this before – scale of the deaths is 😯

A lot of the legacy waste at Sellafield is from MoD bomb production, not power stations. Much of the rest was stored in ways that were thought quite acceptable at the time, but society has changed its risk appetite. Same as with asbestos (which doesn’t ever decay). I’m not saying there haven’t been mistakes in the nuclear industry, but the actual damage from fossil fuels (let alone the potential) is higher.

Fukushima is treated as an illustration of the risk from nuclear, whereas it actually illustrated the risk from tsunami – over 16 000 immediate deaths and I don’t think the effects of contamination from sewage and chemicals have even been estimated. Unlike radioactivity, there’s no conveniently detectable signal.

The numbers of deaths from coal is quite incredible – several miners are killed every week, & there was a Chinese mine disaster a couple of years ago which killed 160-odd.
Gernany didn’t immediately call a halt to its coal-fired power stations.

The low-level waste is just hat, low-level.

I’m speaking as someone who played on the beach at Seascale the week before they closed it 🙂

Don’t forget all the waste from hospitals.

I reckon all the waste plastic finding its way into the sea is potentially a greater environmental hazard. That isn’t managed in any way at all.

given that the intention was to prevent everyone having to wear furry hats in a socialist workers paradise, then the environmental impact of the Western nuclear programmes was far smaller than a Soviet empire running from the Pacific to the Atlantic

An interesting watch, very high level and skimmed through a lot – there is a very good BBC doco on the fire.
Was nice to see what had changed visually since I handed my pass in 3 1/2 years ago.

I like jim al-khalili’s presenting style. Very Smart guy, but his programs seem to find a good level between the complex science and general knowledge that the man-in-the-street can understand!

His series “Shock and Awe – The Story of Electricity” is well worth rooting out online, as it was a landmark series in modern science documentary making imo 😉

Courage above and beyond.
Windscale Fire.

Mrs S’s family used to regularly go swimming in the lake next to this place.
Explains a lot.

TRWSFYNYDD LAKE, nice warm water from the reactor cooling tanks, and Stwlan dam in the background one of the first major Hydro electric schemes in the uk, and still working a great ride up the switchback road to the top.

A good programe that glossed over accidents and failures in nuclear power as well as the huge costs involved in keeping the place safe.

He did say “the reactor could explode” at one point. Which seems odd for someone who presumably designs them?

Just watched it, I thought it was good. Make the redicoulous level of regulation relating to the tiny amounts if radioactive materials I deal with seem even more obsurd, all driven my uneducated media hype.

Just watched it, not bad at all. However, not the first documentary inside Sellafied, saw one years ago which covered pretty much all the same stuff.

We’ve had worse industrial disasters in the UK but I don’t see anyone using that as an excuse to stop producing oil and gas

The thing is with the nuclear stuff is if it goes wrong the damage/effects last forever (or more than your lifetime anyway). Just look at chernobyl, uninhabitable now (unless you’re part of the thriving wildlife)

My grandfather-in-law was a senior person there, back when it was Windscale – the story of the fire was amazing, the rods caught fire and expanded, so they were trying to hammer them out of the pile using a length of scaffold pole and a sledgehammer! Once everyone had reached their maximum allowed exposure, they sent down to the local cinema and rounded up a bunch of volunteers to have a go.

I was an apprentice for a chemical company that was contacted by Sellafield engineering to help in a decommissioning project.

As the youngest I ended up going!

The project was to inject polyurethane foam into air ducts on Hero B’s reactor to stop contaminated air escaping. So as a 18 or 19 year old I ended up sitting on top of the reactor bunker for a week. That was 20+ years ago and the building still looked the same – lugging my tool boxes up those winding steel staircases!

Towards the end of the week I asked Sellafields engineering guys why they all tucked their pants into their socks – the reason being that radioactive dust wafts up your legs otherwise! So i had radioactive bollocks or certainly at least a pair of glow in the dark undies.

The alarm chirped constantly as they reckon you respond quicker when the alarm stopped than when an alarm starts.

Scanned for radiation all the time by Sellafield employee, not allowed to goto the toilet unattended.

Proper scarred whitless for the whole time there.

Also became involved later on with another project that involved injecting PU foam into a double skinned pipe that would spring when being remotely cut and trap the blade. Again another stint there as nobody else would go.

Towards the end of the week I asked Sellafields engineering guys why they all tucked their pants into their socks – the reason being that radioactive dust wafts up your legs otherwise! So i had radioactive bollocks or certainly at least a pair of glow in the dark undies.

Did they also get you to collect the tartan paint? Which was hero b?

The one that caught fire. I seem to remember that it was called Hero B when I was there?

If you can find the documentary about the Finnish nuclear depository and the thoughts about keeping people away from it for the next 150000+ yrs that is a great watch.
Also the c4 doc about the nuclear Boy Scout is an amazing story but the it seems to have almost disappeared recently.

Links would be much appreciated .

Rusty Nissan, pile one and pile two when I was there, on the rest they were pulling your radioactive plonker… Trousers in socks, think it just stops the trousers scuffing the floor as the factory issue never fitted.
Alarm is very important, it not working means no protection/warning hence it’s chiming an all OK. If it goes off its loud and you run, it it stops you get out.
Not sure why they needed to see you shit? Never happened to me…

there was a very good program about the Windscale fire a few years ago, the program last night didn’t mention them turning the fans on to blow the fire out but ending up fanning the flames or the issues they had with the casing around the fuel rods.

The guy on the BBC program had his own pants tucked in his socks at the end if the program which reminded me.

Anyway radioactive bollocks is a better story to tell your mates in the pub than the trousers being too long!

A lot of the legacy waste at Sellafield is from MoD bomb production, not power stations.

Plus the miners strike. Why Dirty Thirty got filled with with little regard for inventory control. We’ve (power station) only just got rid of the extra provision on site (gas, chemicals etc.) in the last few years.

Rusty Nissan, pile one and pile two when I was there, on the rest they were pulling your radioactive plonker… Trousers in socks, think it just stops the trousers scuffing the floor as the factory issue never fitted.

Depends.

If it’s a C2 environment you don’t want any contam getting inside your coveralls so tuck them over overshoes, gloves etc.

If it’s C0 and just a radiation controlled zone then there’s no need.

Our electronic dosimetry is silent interestingly enough, never thought about it like that but wouldn’t fancy doing a nightshift with a constantly chirping EPD on my belt.

Maybe we should do what the yanks used to do and push it over the sides of navy ships in deep ocean!

I suppose the worrying part is pretty much every government of nuclear powered countries has resided over leaks and f$$k ups and all to a man has tried to cover it up even when it’s been obvious.

Epd and criticality alarms just blend into the background after a while, I would know they were there and when testing was going on know it was too quiet. Think there was only 1 or 2 places in the film I hadn’t been and many more fun ones I got to explore. The place has a fascinating history and the waste stored is not representative of a modern nuclear industry.

I always thought that THORP was an interesting part of what they were doing, although I understand didn’t really meet expectations (not seen this program).

The worst part of the UK nuclear industry is that our idiot politicians allowed it to whither on the vine, such that even if we wanted to build a new set of stations, we couldn’t without the help of the French or Chinese. Absolutely criminal loss of scientific knowledge, but indicative of our wider issues as an economy/country.

If it’s a C2 environment you don’t want any contam getting inside your coveralls so tuck them over overshoes, gloves etc.

If it’s C0 and just a radiation controlled zone then there’s no need.

Our electronic dosimetry is silent interestingly enough, never thought about it like that but wouldn’t fancy doing a nightshift with a constantly chirping EPD on my belt.

If it’s a C2 environment, you don’t necessarily have to wear coveralls; just shoe & coat. Tuck your pants into your socks so they don’t (potentially) drag on the floor though. As for a criticality alarm; if you hear one of them, GTFO!

If it’s a C2 environment, you don’t necessarily have to wear coveralls; just shoe & coat. Tuck your pants into your socks so they don’t (potentially) drag on the floor though. As for a criticality alarm; if you hear one of them, GTFO!

😯

C2. As in known fixed (surface) contaminants. As in there is stuff here but the current work being done doesn’t make it practicable to clean it up enough. You go in like that on our sites and you might as well save yourself the trouble and hand your pass in before you go in.

Caught up on this tonight having spent my life living on the other side of the water and being made aware of it apres the spill into the Irish Sea. Found the program really interesting and well done, wished it was more of a series on other energy industries as well!