A strong contender for bleakest headline of the week. But it’s only Monday.
“Bottomless pit of hell, money and despair”
I thought that was parliament?
Second anti nuclear post today. The boys over at r/nuclear going to be losing their mind!
Seriously, nuclear in our country is shit and always will be shit. Why.. not because of the technology, because it’s complicated and we don’t do complicated well. Unless it’s taxation.. then fuck it the more complicated the better!
Solar and wind are doing better because it’s smaller and less complex.
Ministers who visit Sellafield for the first time are left with no illusions about the challenge at Europe’s most toxic nuclear site.
One former UK secretary of state described it as a “bottomless pit of hell, money and despair”, which sucked up so much cash that it drowned out many other projects the economy could otherwise benefit from.
For workers, it is a place of fascination and fear.
“Entering Sellafield is like arriving in another world: it’s like nuclear Narnia,” according to one senior employee. “Except you don’t go through a cupboard, you go through checkpoints while police patrol with guns.” Others call it nuclear Disneyland.
Sellafield, a huge nuclear dump on the Cumbrian coast in north-west England, covers more than 6 sq km (2 sq miles). It dates to the cold war arms race, and was the original site for the development of nuclear weapons in the UK in 1947, manufacturing plutonium. It was home to the world’s first full-scale commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall, which was commissioned in 1956 and ceased generating electricity in 2003.
It has been at the centre of disaster and controversy, including the Windscale fire of 1957. The blaze was considered one of the worst nuclear incidents in Europe at the time, and carried a plume of toxic smoke across to the continent. The milk from cows on 200 sq miles of Cumbrian farmland was condemned as radioactive.
Sellafield began receiving radioactive waste for disposal in 1959, and has since taken thousands of tons of material, from spent fuel rods to scrap metal, which is stored in concrete silos, artificial ponds and sealed buildings. A constant programme of work is required to keep its crumbling buildings safe and create new facilities to contain the toxic waste. The site is expected to be in operation until at least 2130.
The estimated cost of running and cleaning up the site have soared. Sellafield is so expensive to maintain that it is considered a fiscal risk by budgetary officials. The latest estimate for cleaning up the Britain’s nuclear sites is £263bn, of which Sellafield is by far the biggest proportion. However, adjustments to its treatments in accounts can move the dial by more than £100bn, more than the UK’s entire annual deficit. The cost of decommissioning the site is a growing liability that does not count towards the calculation of the UK’s net debt.
Sellafield is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a quango sponsored and funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero that is tasked with cleaning 17 sites across the UK.
The site has a workforce of 11,000, with its own railway, road network, laundry services for normal and potentially radioactive garments, and its own police force with more than 80 dogs. It has almost 1,000 buildings.
Local animals, including swallows, have been found to carry radioactive traces from the site with them. Debate rages locally over just how toxic the “atomic kittens” – stray cats that inhabit the site – may be. Sellafield says cats are screened for radioactivity before they are rehomed.
The activities at the site are a matter of significant scrutiny to countries including the US, Norway and Ireland, given that Sellafield hosts the largest store of plutonium in the world and takes waste from countries such as Italy and Sweden.
Norwegians have long feared the effects of an accident at the site, with modelling suggesting that prevailing south-westerly winds could carry radioactive particles from a large incident at the site across the North Sea, with potentially devastating consequences for its food production and wildlife.
Norway and Ireland were involved in efforts to halt the release of technetium-99, a radioactive metal, into the sea by Sellafield. In 2003, Norway accused Sellafield of ruining its lobster business.
Jobs at Sellafield are often considered to be a golden ticket, according to sources, as the site offers long-term employment with above-average wages in a region with few big employers.
Sellafield is at the heart of the so-called “nuclear coast” in West Cumbria, sandwiched between the Lake District national park and the Irish Sea. At its southern end, BAE Systems in Barrow-in-Furness builds nuclear submarines. Land neighbouring the site has long been earmarked for a new nuclear power station but plans for Moorside collapsed in 2018 when the Japanese conglomerate Toshiba walked away.
The Sellafield site is a significant source of economic support for the region, and sources described a close-knit community where everyone either works at Sellafield or knows someone who does.
Well-paid managers at Sellafield typically reside in the rural area to the south of the site, as well as idyllic villages including Gosforth, where house prices average £311,000, according to Rightmove. Workington and Whitehaven, to the north, are host to the rank and file, a source says, with average house prices of £133,000 and £155,000 respectively.
Sellafield’s former chief executive Martin Chown was paid between £330,000 and £334,999 a year. Graduates can get a starting salary of £36,556; managers earn almost £50,000 on average; and plant engineers are typically on £63,000, according to the jobs website Indeed. The average salary in the north-west in 2022 was £30,248, according to the Office for National Statistics.
They need to change the name of it again then it will be fine.
But I thought nuclear was supposed to be all super eco friendly & clean & green /s
Two stories about Sellafield today – the second one regarding China and/or Russia hacking the nuclear site
I’m starting to the guardian is the news paper equivalent of this sub. It’s just a shit filled pit of misery.
Just finished working there last week. Complete shit hole, but you can make good money.
I worked for the UKAEA in the 80’s on a big project on Enhanced Oil Recovery from the North Sea. A seemingly strange idea, but there was plenty of expertise on using giant computer codes, which were not so common then. So, one of my colleagues, who was an expert in modelling flow in porous rock (like an oil reservoir), was asked to model the spread through the subsoil of nuclear waste from a leaky tank at Sellafield, to predict how long it would take before leaked waste spread far enough to be in public land.
Unfortunately, my story ends there, as I do not know the result of the study. It was not the kind of information that we were allowed to share freely. However, it shows that there have been serious problems for decades.
It’s never been the same since Richard Burton blew it up.
Meanwhile the output from fossil fuels isn’t stored at a secure site away from you, but instead is breathed in by yourselves daily.
Articles on the place give the impression noone there truly wants this to be resolved. It’s an £200bn cashcow for one of the most economically deprived areas in the country.
If they want this to go away they need a meaningful alternative.
Could make a few ££ doing tours like they did at chernobyl before the war..
Can’t we just scrape it up and send it to China? Hell it’s the least we can do to return the favour after the whole covid thing?
11,000 people work there and it produces nothing, how grim
I visited here for work once. I remember there was a large sign at the gate saying something like “if you hear an intermittent alarm, leave the site immediately. If you hear a continuous alarm under no circumstances should you leave the site”.
You’re probably radioactive….
bUt nUCleaR IS SaFe!!!
Bollocks. Not when it’s all about profit.
I seem to remember some story of an actual “bottomless pit” on the site that they kept throwing low level waste into. I don’t remember the details though.
The bit about broadcasting usernames and passwords on Countryfile! That’s really… something
Edit: that’s the other article, linked here in the comments
And this is precisely why people are anti-nuclear. It was done with a comedic lack of regard for the long term consequences. There were multiple containment breaches at this and other sites that we know about and probably a whole lot more that we don’t know about, resulting in horrific lasting contamination of northern England and western Ireland (which still have some of the highest rates of thyroid cancer in the world). I wonder how radioactive eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union are (its distressing to even speculate).
When sites like Sellafield finally reached the end of its service life it was effectively abandoned with no thorough clean up and permanent decommissioning taking place. Just locked in a deadly time bomb like stasis with an exponentially bigger gigantic bill to come.
Fortunately nuclear has moved on a lot since Sellafield was a flagship example of the technology and the future of micro reactors is very much safer and more manageable but goodness me what a horror it was in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. It really is genuinely terrifying how much environmental and human carnage has and will be continued to be caused for centuries to come by these totems of the arrogance and ignorance of the post-war scientific crowd.
It really is astonishing to me as an oldie that we made it this far without wiping ourselves out in a nuclear war or causing irreversible damage to the biosphere. Even with all the other environmental catastrophes of recent decades, this surely was the worst and unfortunately thanks to the nature of nuclear, it has the potential to come back to haunt us for centuries or even millennia to come.
21 comments
A strong contender for bleakest headline of the week. But it’s only Monday.
“Bottomless pit of hell, money and despair”
I thought that was parliament?
Second anti nuclear post today. The boys over at r/nuclear going to be losing their mind!
Seriously, nuclear in our country is shit and always will be shit. Why.. not because of the technology, because it’s complicated and we don’t do complicated well. Unless it’s taxation.. then fuck it the more complicated the better!
Solar and wind are doing better because it’s smaller and less complex.
Ministers who visit Sellafield for the first time are left with no illusions about the challenge at Europe’s most toxic nuclear site.
One former UK secretary of state described it as a “bottomless pit of hell, money and despair”, which sucked up so much cash that it drowned out many other projects the economy could otherwise benefit from.
For workers, it is a place of fascination and fear.
“Entering Sellafield is like arriving in another world: it’s like nuclear Narnia,” according to one senior employee. “Except you don’t go through a cupboard, you go through checkpoints while police patrol with guns.” Others call it nuclear Disneyland.
Sellafield, a huge nuclear dump on the Cumbrian coast in north-west England, covers more than 6 sq km (2 sq miles). It dates to the cold war arms race, and was the original site for the development of nuclear weapons in the UK in 1947, manufacturing plutonium. It was home to the world’s first full-scale commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall, which was commissioned in 1956 and ceased generating electricity in 2003.
It has been at the centre of disaster and controversy, including the Windscale fire of 1957. The blaze was considered one of the worst nuclear incidents in Europe at the time, and carried a plume of toxic smoke across to the continent. The milk from cows on 200 sq miles of Cumbrian farmland was condemned as radioactive.
Sellafield began receiving radioactive waste for disposal in 1959, and has since taken thousands of tons of material, from spent fuel rods to scrap metal, which is stored in concrete silos, artificial ponds and sealed buildings. A constant programme of work is required to keep its crumbling buildings safe and create new facilities to contain the toxic waste. The site is expected to be in operation until at least 2130.
The estimated cost of running and cleaning up the site have soared. Sellafield is so expensive to maintain that it is considered a fiscal risk by budgetary officials. The latest estimate for cleaning up the Britain’s nuclear sites is £263bn, of which Sellafield is by far the biggest proportion. However, adjustments to its treatments in accounts can move the dial by more than £100bn, more than the UK’s entire annual deficit. The cost of decommissioning the site is a growing liability that does not count towards the calculation of the UK’s net debt.
Sellafield is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a quango sponsored and funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero that is tasked with cleaning 17 sites across the UK.
The site has a workforce of 11,000, with its own railway, road network, laundry services for normal and potentially radioactive garments, and its own police force with more than 80 dogs. It has almost 1,000 buildings.
Local animals, including swallows, have been found to carry radioactive traces from the site with them. Debate rages locally over just how toxic the “atomic kittens” – stray cats that inhabit the site – may be. Sellafield says cats are screened for radioactivity before they are rehomed.
The activities at the site are a matter of significant scrutiny to countries including the US, Norway and Ireland, given that Sellafield hosts the largest store of plutonium in the world and takes waste from countries such as Italy and Sweden.
Norwegians have long feared the effects of an accident at the site, with modelling suggesting that prevailing south-westerly winds could carry radioactive particles from a large incident at the site across the North Sea, with potentially devastating consequences for its food production and wildlife.
Norway and Ireland were involved in efforts to halt the release of technetium-99, a radioactive metal, into the sea by Sellafield. In 2003, Norway accused Sellafield of ruining its lobster business.
Jobs at Sellafield are often considered to be a golden ticket, according to sources, as the site offers long-term employment with above-average wages in a region with few big employers.
Sellafield is at the heart of the so-called “nuclear coast” in West Cumbria, sandwiched between the Lake District national park and the Irish Sea. At its southern end, BAE Systems in Barrow-in-Furness builds nuclear submarines. Land neighbouring the site has long been earmarked for a new nuclear power station but plans for Moorside collapsed in 2018 when the Japanese conglomerate Toshiba walked away.
The Sellafield site is a significant source of economic support for the region, and sources described a close-knit community where everyone either works at Sellafield or knows someone who does.
Well-paid managers at Sellafield typically reside in the rural area to the south of the site, as well as idyllic villages including Gosforth, where house prices average £311,000, according to Rightmove. Workington and Whitehaven, to the north, are host to the rank and file, a source says, with average house prices of £133,000 and £155,000 respectively.
Sellafield’s former chief executive Martin Chown was paid between £330,000 and £334,999 a year. Graduates can get a starting salary of £36,556; managers earn almost £50,000 on average; and plant engineers are typically on £63,000, according to the jobs website Indeed. The average salary in the north-west in 2022 was £30,248, according to the Office for National Statistics.
They need to change the name of it again then it will be fine.
But I thought nuclear was supposed to be all super eco friendly & clean & green /s
Two stories about Sellafield today – the second one regarding China and/or Russia hacking the nuclear site
[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-nuclear-site-hacked-groups-russia-china](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-nuclear-site-hacked-groups-russia-china)
Cheery stuff.
I’m starting to the guardian is the news paper equivalent of this sub. It’s just a shit filled pit of misery.
Just finished working there last week. Complete shit hole, but you can make good money.
I worked for the UKAEA in the 80’s on a big project on Enhanced Oil Recovery from the North Sea. A seemingly strange idea, but there was plenty of expertise on using giant computer codes, which were not so common then. So, one of my colleagues, who was an expert in modelling flow in porous rock (like an oil reservoir), was asked to model the spread through the subsoil of nuclear waste from a leaky tank at Sellafield, to predict how long it would take before leaked waste spread far enough to be in public land.
Unfortunately, my story ends there, as I do not know the result of the study. It was not the kind of information that we were allowed to share freely. However, it shows that there have been serious problems for decades.
It’s never been the same since Richard Burton blew it up.
Meanwhile the output from fossil fuels isn’t stored at a secure site away from you, but instead is breathed in by yourselves daily.
Articles on the place give the impression noone there truly wants this to be resolved. It’s an £200bn cashcow for one of the most economically deprived areas in the country.
If they want this to go away they need a meaningful alternative.
Could make a few ££ doing tours like they did at chernobyl before the war..
Can’t we just scrape it up and send it to China? Hell it’s the least we can do to return the favour after the whole covid thing?
11,000 people work there and it produces nothing, how grim
I visited here for work once. I remember there was a large sign at the gate saying something like “if you hear an intermittent alarm, leave the site immediately. If you hear a continuous alarm under no circumstances should you leave the site”.
You’re probably radioactive….
bUt nUCleaR IS SaFe!!!
Bollocks. Not when it’s all about profit.
I seem to remember some story of an actual “bottomless pit” on the site that they kept throwing low level waste into. I don’t remember the details though.
The bit about broadcasting usernames and passwords on Countryfile! That’s really… something
Edit: that’s the other article, linked here in the comments
And this is precisely why people are anti-nuclear. It was done with a comedic lack of regard for the long term consequences. There were multiple containment breaches at this and other sites that we know about and probably a whole lot more that we don’t know about, resulting in horrific lasting contamination of northern England and western Ireland (which still have some of the highest rates of thyroid cancer in the world). I wonder how radioactive eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union are (its distressing to even speculate).
When sites like Sellafield finally reached the end of its service life it was effectively abandoned with no thorough clean up and permanent decommissioning taking place. Just locked in a deadly time bomb like stasis with an exponentially bigger gigantic bill to come.
Fortunately nuclear has moved on a lot since Sellafield was a flagship example of the technology and the future of micro reactors is very much safer and more manageable but goodness me what a horror it was in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. It really is genuinely terrifying how much environmental and human carnage has and will be continued to be caused for centuries to come by these totems of the arrogance and ignorance of the post-war scientific crowd.
It really is astonishing to me as an oldie that we made it this far without wiping ourselves out in a nuclear war or causing irreversible damage to the biosphere. Even with all the other environmental catastrophes of recent decades, this surely was the worst and unfortunately thanks to the nature of nuclear, it has the potential to come back to haunt us for centuries or even millennia to come.