Sellafield

[The Windscale Piles reactors, Sellafield, Cumbria. Photograph: Robert Brook/Alamy. A suitably apocalyptic picture, lifted from the Guardian. Eight years old. 'Pile' being the old name for a nuclear reactor]

Following the post-scripted advertisement at reference 1, I have now got around to reading the piece about Sellafield at reference 2.

I have learned that safe disposal of nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel is an expensive business, a lot more expensive than was realised during the first wave of civil nuclear enthusiasm in the 1950's and 1960's. It may be that the reactors being built at that time were far worse from this point of view than those build subsequently, but we are not told anything about that.

I am reminded of the various accidents over the years at Windscale, or Sellafield, as it became. Accidents which were bad in themselves but were sometimes made worse by an official tendency to deny, hide or otherwise minimise them. And I am reminded of the clusters of leukemia on nearby English, Welsh and Irish coasts, clusters which still seem to attract a fair amount of scientific interest. I am also reminded of the fairly useless visit we paid to the place, perhaps twenty years ago now. Bland and uninformative - although, to be fair, hard to know where to pitch when you are open to all comers, whoever shows up on the day. Bus loads from local senior centres wanting a day out, a chat and the odd cuppa?

And then there is the steady stream of the burst pipes, leaking storage vessels and leaking storage ponds which seem to be an all but inevitable feature of long term storage of waste of this kind. Some of which require very expensive action in mitigation. From where I associate to the quite complicated engineering sometimes needed to stop landfill sites leaking unpleasant stuff into the surrounding land and water: just dumping stuff in a big hole in the ground and then filling over is not always good enough.

While the Finns have got on and built an underground disposal facility, expensive but seemingly the best way forward. See reference 5. We are still talking about ours.

All in all, a messy and expensive business. A business on which we ought to be able to trust our government to do the science and come up with reasonable answers, striking a reasonable balance between the inevitably conflicting demands. And then allocate the necessary funds and get on with it. The man in the street should not feel the need to blunder around to come up with his own answers. 

I dare say there are various long reports out there for the reading. But I doubt whether I will muster the energy to find them, let alone to read them and for the moment I remain 'for' nuclear power.

In sum, an article which reminds me that there is a problem, but one which does not attempt any answers.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/trolley-551.html.

Reference 2: Dismantling Sellafield: Nothing is produced at Sellafield nuclear site any more. But making safe what is left behind is an almost unimaginably expensie and complex task that requires us to think not on a human timescal, but a planetary one - Samanth Subramaniam, Guardian - 2022.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire.

Reference 4: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/sellafield-ltd. It might be called Sellafield Ltd, but as far as I can make out, it does not run to its own website in the way of other large companies. But there is plenty of reading material.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository.

Reference 6: http://www.less-light.com/. Quite possibly the same Robert Brook as the one credited with the snap above. There are some rather good night time images to be found here.