9 ms·

Inside Sellafield's death zone with the nuclear clean-up robots

116 points by ljf 8y ago

Tehchops 8y ago
Does the intense radiation not interfere with communications to the drones/robots?
- liamkinne 8y ago
  Different wavelengths is the short answer. But yes, there would be enough interference to cause damage after a while. Note that these robots probably aren't usiu the latest 14nm process so they have a natural immunity to bit flips.
  - TylerE 8y ago
    They also likely have redundent systems - e.g. everything in triplicate and requires a 'majority vote' to take any action.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Yes, it would have been nice to have more information on that since this is a serious problem. Shielding helps up to a point, but you need a lot of shielding to keep out gamma radiation and hot neutrons.
- teraflop 8y ago
  Radiation can affect the electronics themselves (by corrupting data, or by slow physical degradation of the physical hardware) but other than that, I don't think it has any particularly noticeable effect on communications. The "radiation" from a reactor core mostly consists of highly energetic particles and gamma rays. It's not going to directly interfere with anything in the radio spectrum, or induce significant voltages on cables.
  - ljf 8y ago
    I'm assuming that these are 'built to last' - as once they are no longer working I can only think that they themselves would become radioactive waste that will need disposing of. Is it unlikely that a human would be able to work on the robots to repair them due to the levels of radiation?
  - csense 8y ago
    I'd think it's much less of a concern than in space. For one, space robots are far enough away that there's a big time delay to Earth communications, these robots will have control stations <1km away. So the only electronics on board the actual robot should be fairly rugged motor drivers and wireless comms. Add in an extra redundant copy or two of all the IC's (and possibly enough motors to give redundant degrees of freedom), and a policy of pulling out and rebuilding the robot when a certain number of non-function-impairing radiation damage events occur, and it's a non-issue. Radiation causes huge headaches in space because there's no way to pull it out or send in a replacement, and comms have seconds - minutes of lag. These don't apply to Earth based robots, even in super hazardous environments like this.
    - aftbit 8y ago
      Also they won't need to lift the robot's mass into space (which costs on the order of $5000/kg), so for most of the 'bots, they will be able to easily add additional shielding around critical electronics. Robots which are intended to fit into very small spaces might not have this option, but also hopefully will be cheaper than their larger brothers. I wonder how many robots will become part of the contaminated decommissioning waste. Perhaps they will develop robots to disassemble and store the damaged and contaminated robots, filling a function like decomposers in nature.
- joshvm 8y ago
  As far as possible, you don't put complex electronics in there. Motors connected by an umbilical cable to the operator, analogue sensors, etc. In some situations you might be able to use a mechanical or hydraulic system. See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20678838 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20678838 "Most nuclear robots operate on power provided by a trailing umbilical. This means there are no batteries to change and no refuelling issues to contend with." It's reasonably rare to have full or even semi-autonomous in nuclear due to the risks involved of something going wrong, or the thing just dying. Easier just to remote control down a cable. See also https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/01439911211249715 https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/014399112112... for an interesting overview of robots used at Fukushima.
imglorp 8y ago
> The environment group Greenpeace, which bitterly opposed the opening of Thorp, is enthusiastic about decommissioning. I feel like the Greenpeace position is anachronistic and still on the wrong side of common sense. They might have missed an opportunity to slow climate change. We've had nuclear generation for 64 years now and harm to the environment is minimal. Three major (to us) accidents and a bunch of lesser material releases have had minimal impact to the earth in the big scheme of things. Of far greater harm is our extraction and burning of fossil. The California methane leak, all of the various oil spills, and now shale drilling all have substantial, long term harm we can measure in the climate and the local ecologies. Obviously we'd prefer greener power if possible, but nuclear power appears by far the lesser evil than all the fossil activity.
- UweSchmidt 8y ago
  Just because the adoption of greener power is coming along only now, a few decades late, doesn't mean that it is an either-or between nuclear and fossil. I assume Greenpeace and other environmentalists would have prefered a much faster transition.
- guitarbill 8y ago
  The conversation on nuclear power has never been a rational one. This has some interesting effects. Because it's so hard to get funding on anything, not that much research has been done on how to decontaminate radioactive waste. You might disagree about doing it in the first place, but still support research to clean up. Because it's so hard to get permission to build new reactors, older reactors were used for longer. But we've learned a lot about safety and fail-safes since the 80s. There's a very shabby strip club directly outside Amazon's meeting centre in Seattle for a similar reason. I'm told the owner wouldn't mind renovating or moving, but zoning laws make those difficult. So because the policy making is driven by morality and not rationality, you end up with weird (side)effects.
  - sailfast 8y ago
    Are you sure it's not there because it is finding high net worth clients across the street? As for nuclear power and research on cleanup - it appears this industry will be worth a lot of money post Fukushima which does appear to be spurring the requisite R&D, which should be good news for this kind of tech. Granted, probably not what is required to really make this decontamination jump to the level that it becomes "easy" but at least it is something better than "Oh sure eventually we'll put them on a train and stick them in the ground, you know, as long as the earth doesn't destroy those plans first with an earthquake, hurricane, etc"
shaqbert 8y ago
Mox fuel based nuclear reactors never really took off. Thus producing mox fuel by reprocessing used nuclear fuel rods never turned out to address a big market. Cleaning this up is probably a similar challenge compared the Hanford plutonium reprocessing plant in the US. I hope they do a much better job this time around.
benj111 8y ago
The article doesn't mention it but Sellafield used to be known as Windscale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
- keithpeter 8y ago
  Calder Hall -> Windscale -> Sellafield Calder Hall fire 1957: I was in the womb 100 miles downwind at that time and have reasons to be grateful for 'Cockroft's folly' [1] Windscale Enquiry 1978: I was 20 then and THORP was bitterly opposed by environmental organisations, the Manx government and quite a few engineers, the latter on the grounds that it would never be viable [2, 3] Nuclear power, especially with reactors that require heavily enriched fuel, in a small densely populated country, is always going to be problematic. [1] https://www.khl.com/news/final-cockcroft-folly-is-demolished/103263.article https://www.khl.com/news/final-cockcroft-folly-is-demolished... [2] http://www.worldcat.orgwww.worldcat.org/title/windscale-inquiry-report/oclc/004641156 http://www.worldcat.orgwww.worldcat.org/title/windscale-inqu... [3] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1978/mar/22/windscale-inquiry-report https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1978/mar/...
hobbes78 8y ago
I believe this to be the biggest problem of nuclear power, not the risks of an accident. So while we have cheap energy today, the cost of containment will be paid throughout thousands of years. This doesn't make any sense from the economic perspective.
- jlarocco 8y ago
  I'm not an expert, but I think nuclear "waste" that's radioactive enough to be dangerous can be recycled to generate more electricity.
  - pacificmint 8y ago
    > I think nuclear "waste" that's radioactive enough to be dangerous can be recycled to generate more electricity. That was the whole point of this plant, to reprocess spend fuel so it could be used again. None of the countries that tried nuclear reprocessing have made it work, and now that it is shut down, this plant needs a complicated, multi billion $ cleanup. So no, the nuclear waste does not get recycled, and we should figure out how to deal with it.
    - smueller1234 8y ago
      Some anecdotal data to support your assertion about nobody having made reprocessing work: there are also significant amounts of highly radioactive waste stranded at the former reprocessing plant in Karlsruhe, Germany. I used to work in the greater facility.
Symbiote 8y ago
The article says THORP "Generated revenues of £9bn", and cost £1.8bn to build (1994 pounds?). Decommissioning is forecast to cost £4bn. Presumably at least £4bn, given the rest of the project's costs. Subtract operating costs, which I can't find, and I wonder what the overall loss to British taxpayers is.
- ljf 8y ago
  I'd love to be proven wrong but I believe that all nuclear plants have been loss making, even without taking decommissioning into account. The use of nuclear isnt or wasn't always about 'cheap dnergy' but about energy security. Don't forget that we often don't think of tbe huge geopolitical costs of our continued reliance on oil.
- pippy 8y ago
  It looks like nuclear didn't grow as much as they were hoping. So Sellafield's parent company could take their earnings and dump the tax payer with the clean up cost. I won't be surprised if they put Sellafield into liquidation before they finish clean up. It seems quite suspect to me.
  - MistahKoala 8y ago
    Sellafield's owner is the NDA. Liquidating Sellafield would likely only end up with it being handed to... the NDA.
acd 8y ago
I think of the music band Kraftwerks songs as somehow being ahead of its time. -Song names: We are the robots and Radioactivity, The song Radioactivity names Sellafield in the lyrics.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  The original English lyrics of "Radioactivity" ("Radioactivität") are "Radioactivity / is in the air for you and me" [1]. The version with "Chernobyl – Harrisburg – Sellafield – Hiroshima / Stop radioactivity ... / chain reaction and mutation / contaminated population" [2] is a later rewrite. In live performances, "Hiroshima" is now replaced with "Fukushima". The music is also darker than the original. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjCxJ8ErpYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjCxJ8ErpYg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBTn_3DBYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBTn_3DBYo
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  They updated the song "Radioactivity" for their "3-D" box set, and the updated lyrics include Fukushima. Highly recommend seeing them live, if you have the opportunity.
gene-h 8y ago
Many of these approaches for cleaning up nuclear waste from legacy nuclear sites may also be useful for fusion reactors. I talked with one of the people working on building robots for Sellafield and one of their other projects was building a robot to refurbish parts for ITER. Nuclear fusion reactors like ITER will need to go down periodically for maintenance. The amount of time the reactor spends offline is lost money, so maintenance needs to be done as fast as possible. So one of the robots they were working on would go into a pipe, cut it into pieces, put in a new pipe and reweld it within 30 seconds. Another interesting challenge for robots in ITER is that some may be exposed to such high levels of radiation that the: "designers can forget all the advances in electronics we have witnessed since the 1960s: only a few discrete transistors can be employed, with integrated circuits being forbidden for their sensitivity to radiation."[0] [0]https://mappingignorance.org/2014/01/29/iter-engineering-challenges-ofputting-the-sun-into-a-box-part-3/ https://mappingignorance.org/2014/01/29/iter-engineering-cha...
Neil44 8y ago
I visited there on a school trip and we all took the tour, I probably didn't get as much out of it as I would now but I still remember it 25+ years later so I guess it was worth it. The school also took us to see Electric Mountain which has been on HN once or twice too IIRC. I guess it was a pretty science loving school. Seeing these things first hand helped in putting extremist views on the subject into context in later years.
8bitsrule 8y ago
tldr: Site of a 1957 uranium fire at Windscale. "Safe, clean, too cheap to meter." => "The estimated lifetime undiscounted cost of dealing with the Sellafield site increased to £67.5 billion." - WP Not found anywhere: total, worldwide taxpayer funds spent or committed to subsidize and decommission.

116 points by ljf 8y ago

Tehchops 8y ago

Does the intense radiation not interfere with communications to the drones/robots?

liamkinne 8y ago
Different wavelengths is the short answer. But yes, there would be enough interference to cause damage after a while. Note that these robots probably aren't usiu the latest 14nm process so they have a natural immunity to bit flips.
- TylerE 8y ago
  They also likely have redundent systems - e.g. everything in triplicate and requires a 'majority vote' to take any action.
pjc50 8y ago
Yes, it would have been nice to have more information on that since this is a serious problem. Shielding helps up to a point, but you need a lot of shielding to keep out gamma radiation and hot neutrons.
teraflop 8y ago
Radiation can affect the electronics themselves (by corrupting data, or by slow physical degradation of the physical hardware) but other than that, I don't think it has any particularly noticeable effect on communications. The "radiation" from a reactor core mostly consists of highly energetic particles and gamma rays. It's not going to directly interfere with anything in the radio spectrum, or induce significant voltages on cables.
- ljf 8y ago
  I'm assuming that these are 'built to last' - as once they are no longer working I can only think that they themselves would become radioactive waste that will need disposing of. Is it unlikely that a human would be able to work on the robots to repair them due to the levels of radiation?
- csense 8y ago
  I'd think it's much less of a concern than in space. For one, space robots are far enough away that there's a big time delay to Earth communications, these robots will have control stations <1km away. So the only electronics on board the actual robot should be fairly rugged motor drivers and wireless comms. Add in an extra redundant copy or two of all the IC's (and possibly enough motors to give redundant degrees of freedom), and a policy of pulling out and rebuilding the robot when a certain number of non-function-impairing radiation damage events occur, and it's a non-issue. Radiation causes huge headaches in space because there's no way to pull it out or send in a replacement, and comms have seconds - minutes of lag. These don't apply to Earth based robots, even in super hazardous environments like this.
  - aftbit 8y ago
    Also they won't need to lift the robot's mass into space (which costs on the order of $5000/kg), so for most of the 'bots, they will be able to easily add additional shielding around critical electronics. Robots which are intended to fit into very small spaces might not have this option, but also hopefully will be cheaper than their larger brothers. I wonder how many robots will become part of the contaminated decommissioning waste. Perhaps they will develop robots to disassemble and store the damaged and contaminated robots, filling a function like decomposers in nature.
joshvm 8y ago
As far as possible, you don't put complex electronics in there. Motors connected by an umbilical cable to the operator, analogue sensors, etc. In some situations you might be able to use a mechanical or hydraulic system. See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20678838 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20678838 "Most nuclear robots operate on power provided by a trailing umbilical. This means there are no batteries to change and no refuelling issues to contend with." It's reasonably rare to have full or even semi-autonomous in nuclear due to the risks involved of something going wrong, or the thing just dying. Easier just to remote control down a cable. See also https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/01439911211249715 https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/014399112112... for an interesting overview of robots used at Fukushima.

imglorp 8y ago

> The environment group Greenpeace, which bitterly opposed the opening of Thorp, is enthusiastic about decommissioning. I feel like the Greenpeace position is anachronistic and still on the wrong side of common sense. They might have missed an opportunity to slow climate change. We've had nuclear generation for 64 years now and harm to the environment is minimal. Three major (to us) accidents and a bunch of lesser material releases have had minimal impact to the earth in the big scheme of things. Of far greater harm is our extraction and burning of fossil. The California methane leak, all of the various oil spills, and now shale drilling all have substantial, long term harm we can measure in the climate and the local ecologies. Obviously we'd prefer greener power if possible, but nuclear power appears by far the lesser evil than all the fossil activity.

UweSchmidt 8y ago
Just because the adoption of greener power is coming along only now, a few decades late, doesn't mean that it is an either-or between nuclear and fossil. I assume Greenpeace and other environmentalists would have prefered a much faster transition.
guitarbill 8y ago
The conversation on nuclear power has never been a rational one. This has some interesting effects. Because it's so hard to get funding on anything, not that much research has been done on how to decontaminate radioactive waste. You might disagree about doing it in the first place, but still support research to clean up. Because it's so hard to get permission to build new reactors, older reactors were used for longer. But we've learned a lot about safety and fail-safes since the 80s. There's a very shabby strip club directly outside Amazon's meeting centre in Seattle for a similar reason. I'm told the owner wouldn't mind renovating or moving, but zoning laws make those difficult. So because the policy making is driven by morality and not rationality, you end up with weird (side)effects.
- sailfast 8y ago
  Are you sure it's not there because it is finding high net worth clients across the street? As for nuclear power and research on cleanup - it appears this industry will be worth a lot of money post Fukushima which does appear to be spurring the requisite R&D, which should be good news for this kind of tech. Granted, probably not what is required to really make this decontamination jump to the level that it becomes "easy" but at least it is something better than "Oh sure eventually we'll put them on a train and stick them in the ground, you know, as long as the earth doesn't destroy those plans first with an earthquake, hurricane, etc"

shaqbert 8y ago

Mox fuel based nuclear reactors never really took off. Thus producing mox fuel by reprocessing used nuclear fuel rods never turned out to address a big market. Cleaning this up is probably a similar challenge compared the Hanford plutonium reprocessing plant in the US. I hope they do a much better job this time around.

benj111 8y ago

The article doesn't mention it but Sellafield used to be known as Windscale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

keithpeter 8y ago
Calder Hall -> Windscale -> Sellafield Calder Hall fire 1957: I was in the womb 100 miles downwind at that time and have reasons to be grateful for 'Cockroft's folly' [1] Windscale Enquiry 1978: I was 20 then and THORP was bitterly opposed by environmental organisations, the Manx government and quite a few engineers, the latter on the grounds that it would never be viable [2, 3] Nuclear power, especially with reactors that require heavily enriched fuel, in a small densely populated country, is always going to be problematic. [1] https://www.khl.com/news/final-cockcroft-folly-is-demolished/103263.article https://www.khl.com/news/final-cockcroft-folly-is-demolished... [2] http://www.worldcat.orgwww.worldcat.org/title/windscale-inquiry-report/oclc/004641156 http://www.worldcat.orgwww.worldcat.org/title/windscale-inqu... [3] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1978/mar/22/windscale-inquiry-report https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1978/mar/...

hobbes78 8y ago

I believe this to be the biggest problem of nuclear power, not the risks of an accident. So while we have cheap energy today, the cost of containment will be paid throughout thousands of years. This doesn't make any sense from the economic perspective.

jlarocco 8y ago
I'm not an expert, but I think nuclear "waste" that's radioactive enough to be dangerous can be recycled to generate more electricity.
- pacificmint 8y ago
  > I think nuclear "waste" that's radioactive enough to be dangerous can be recycled to generate more electricity. That was the whole point of this plant, to reprocess spend fuel so it could be used again. None of the countries that tried nuclear reprocessing have made it work, and now that it is shut down, this plant needs a complicated, multi billion $ cleanup. So no, the nuclear waste does not get recycled, and we should figure out how to deal with it.
  - smueller1234 8y ago
    Some anecdotal data to support your assertion about nobody having made reprocessing work: there are also significant amounts of highly radioactive waste stranded at the former reprocessing plant in Karlsruhe, Germany. I used to work in the greater facility.

Symbiote 8y ago

The article says THORP "Generated revenues of £9bn", and cost £1.8bn to build (1994 pounds?). Decommissioning is forecast to cost £4bn. Presumably at least £4bn, given the rest of the project's costs. Subtract operating costs, which I can't find, and I wonder what the overall loss to British taxpayers is.

ljf 8y ago
I'd love to be proven wrong but I believe that all nuclear plants have been loss making, even without taking decommissioning into account. The use of nuclear isnt or wasn't always about 'cheap dnergy' but about energy security. Don't forget that we often don't think of tbe huge geopolitical costs of our continued reliance on oil.
pippy 8y ago
It looks like nuclear didn't grow as much as they were hoping. So Sellafield's parent company could take their earnings and dump the tax payer with the clean up cost. I won't be surprised if they put Sellafield into liquidation before they finish clean up. It seems quite suspect to me.
- MistahKoala 8y ago
  Sellafield's owner is the NDA. Liquidating Sellafield would likely only end up with it being handed to... the NDA.

acd 8y ago

I think of the music band Kraftwerks songs as somehow being ahead of its time. -Song names: We are the robots and Radioactivity, The song Radioactivity names Sellafield in the lyrics.

Symbiote 8y ago
The original English lyrics of "Radioactivity" ("Radioactivität") are "Radioactivity / is in the air for you and me" [1]. The version with "Chernobyl – Harrisburg – Sellafield – Hiroshima / Stop radioactivity ... / chain reaction and mutation / contaminated population" [2] is a later rewrite. In live performances, "Hiroshima" is now replaced with "Fukushima". The music is also darker than the original. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjCxJ8ErpYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjCxJ8ErpYg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBTn_3DBYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBTn_3DBYo
LeoPanthera 8y ago
They updated the song "Radioactivity" for their "3-D" box set, and the updated lyrics include Fukushima. Highly recommend seeing them live, if you have the opportunity.

gene-h 8y ago

Many of these approaches for cleaning up nuclear waste from legacy nuclear sites may also be useful for fusion reactors. I talked with one of the people working on building robots for Sellafield and one of their other projects was building a robot to refurbish parts for ITER. Nuclear fusion reactors like ITER will need to go down periodically for maintenance. The amount of time the reactor spends offline is lost money, so maintenance needs to be done as fast as possible. So one of the robots they were working on would go into a pipe, cut it into pieces, put in a new pipe and reweld it within 30 seconds. Another interesting challenge for robots in ITER is that some may be exposed to such high levels of radiation that the: "designers can forget all the advances in electronics we have witnessed since the 1960s: only a few discrete transistors can be employed, with integrated circuits being forbidden for their sensitivity to radiation."[0] [0]https://mappingignorance.org/2014/01/29/iter-engineering-challenges-ofputting-the-sun-into-a-box-part-3/ https://mappingignorance.org/2014/01/29/iter-engineering-cha...

Neil44 8y ago

I visited there on a school trip and we all took the tour, I probably didn't get as much out of it as I would now but I still remember it 25+ years later so I guess it was worth it. The school also took us to see Electric Mountain which has been on HN once or twice too IIRC. I guess it was a pretty science loving school. Seeing these things first hand helped in putting extremist views on the subject into context in later years.

8bitsrule 8y ago

tldr: Site of a 1957 uranium fire at Windscale. "Safe, clean, too cheap to meter." => "The estimated lifetime undiscounted cost of dealing with the Sellafield site increased to £67.5 billion." - WP Not found anywhere: total, worldwide taxpayer funds spent or committed to subsidize and decommission.