12 ms·

Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site

58 points by tapper 4y ago

canadianfella 4y ago
ck2 4y ago
Weird I submitted this yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34003392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34003392 Even the target url is the same?
- baud147258 4y ago
  according to the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), reposting is allowed: > Are reposts ok? > If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
  - ck2 4y ago
    Oh I didn't personally mind, I am glad the story got attention because nuclear is so popular around here without discussion of the hidden massive consequences. I just found it weird the code didn't catch the dupe from 24 hours ago because it always redirects me when I submit a link that was posted the previous day and pushed off the page.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  The submission queue is fickle.
jmyeet 4y ago
This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates: > Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn. Example: > The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid – enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs – dripped out of a ruptured pipe. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least £300m. Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]: > The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants. So if Chernobyl happened to a US nuclear plant the operating company would be on the hook for at most $450 million. Think about that. The article mentions the 1957 fire. This is lesser-known than Chernobyl (which is often dismissed as an outlier) and less severe but still a major disaster. It's known as the Windscale Fire [2]. [1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Nuclear advocate here. With radiation, people often conflate measureable with hazardous. But when you can measure a single nucleus decaying there are like 20 orders of magnitude between them. Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time. Articles without mSv in them are borderline meaningless. Anyway even with some historical cleanup issues, the facts remain that 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion, climate change is happening due to atmospheric CO2 emissions, nuclear power has among the lowest possible cradle-to-grave CO2 emissions per kWh, we are about 80% fossil fueled today, and nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel. That's why lots of people like nuclear. Coal kills a Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours while operating normally and has to pay nothing for it. Think about that.
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    The problem with all those assumptions is that the "radiological harm" is cumulative and it can accumulate in unexpected ways which aren't random. For example some isotopes enrich in certain organs and then do their damage for a long time. And there's no good framework for treating or checking "acceptable" risks for example with radioactive dirt or whatever. Russian soldiers dug trenches in the hot zone in Tschernobyl just this year. Do we expect people to remember these sites for the next few millenia? The same goes for any potential spill of radioactive material, and that's why long term storage is such a difficult problem. We don't want any to get out, because we'll never be able to tell who gets what dose. And "nuclear advocates" like to say coal, preferrably burned in the least effective or safe way, is the only alternative to nuclear power. Which it's not, of course. They like to forget that replacing coal (and other fossil fuels) means an extreme scaleup in access to radioactive material, thereby scaling up the risks. Especially those from bad intentions, but accidents can't be calculated either. They like to forget that while not that many people die even in major accidents, that's just because a large area is evacuated and cleaned up. At horrendous cost. The Fukushima cleanup may reach a trillion Dollar in cost, btw.
arethuza 4y ago
Air cooled nuclear reactors - what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot as it turns out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
- karencarits 4y ago
  Not to downplay the significance of this disaster, but this is one of the worst nuclear accidents we know - yet "It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal". Not all dams are used for power, of course, but the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam[0] is estimated to have killed 171 000 I guess all infrastructure implies some degree of risk to life and health [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
  - arethuza 4y ago
    Yes - I've got the book "Atomic Accidents" and it starts with a description of a disaster at a Russian hydro plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_station_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_stat...
  - yabones 4y ago
    I think a big part of what makes people so afraid of radiation is how easy it is to detect. Imagine if you had a geiger counter that detected Dioxin, Benzine, or PFAS contamination? It would be going off pretty much constantly. You can detect radioactive materials with a cheap detector, where you need an entire lab to find regular poisons, which doesn't help with our lack of ability to assess risk. For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house. They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning Teflon cookware. It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the entire history of atomic power production. But most people don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel factory that they do to a nuclear power station.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
Somehow this is rarely as fast or cheap as planned.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Often in part because people conflate measurable with hazardous with radiation. If the goal was to allow double the natural dose rates then it would be a lot easier. You need about 20x the natural dose rate for a year before you see an increase in cancer incidence from 42% baseline to 43%. https://whatisnuclear.com/dose-calc.html https://whatisnuclear.com/dose-calc.html
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Given that the goal is 0 and there are plenty of ongoing activities, poorly cleaned up spills, contaminated mining towns, and legacies of carelessness related to the nuclear sector that result in 2-200x background in various pockets, it seems like 0 was a pretty good benchmark and should maybe be reduced a little.
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    There is no meaningful difference between measurable and hazardous radiation. You never know where the stuff builds up. Some isotopes get enriched in some organs and do damage over a long time. Depending on what the material actually is, it can get into unfortunate places and stay there for a few years, irradiating someone. It can get into the food supply doing some more damage than anticipated. None of that is calculateable, so it is better to treat every radiation as a risk. You also forget that workers may be wearing a dosimeter, but average people don't. They'd never know. You can easily reach the 20x increase if you have a contaminated object in your home or car or whatever, even if that contamination isn't that strong.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      This might be a good read for you. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/11340/beir_vii_final.pdf https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/11340/beir_vii_fi...
jen729w 4y ago
Tangentially related, but as everyone here seems to enjoy talk of nuclear [things], it’s worth a recommendation: Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel ‘On the Beach’. If you want high-level spoilers, Wikipedia is your friend. I shan’t say a word other than that it’s a terrific little book that I can’t believe I’d never heard of. I just read it last week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)
bwestergard 4y ago
This is notably one of the locations mentioned in Kraftwerk's "Radioactivität" lyrics.

58 points by tapper 4y ago

ck2 4y ago

Weird I submitted this yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34003392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34003392 Even the target url is the same?

baud147258 4y ago
according to the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), reposting is allowed: > Are reposts ok? > If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
- ck2 4y ago
  Oh I didn't personally mind, I am glad the story got attention because nuclear is so popular around here without discussion of the hidden massive consequences. I just found it weird the code didn't catch the dupe from 24 hours ago because it always redirects me when I submit a link that was posted the previous day and pushed off the page.
dredmorbius 4y ago
The submission queue is fickle.

jmyeet 4y ago

This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates: > Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn. Example: > The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid – enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs – dripped out of a ruptured pipe. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least £300m. Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]: > The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants. So if Chernobyl happened to a US nuclear plant the operating company would be on the hook for at most $450 million. Think about that. The article mentions the 1957 fire. This is lesser-known than Chernobyl (which is often dismissed as an outlier) and less severe but still a major disaster. It's known as the Windscale Fire [2]. [1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Nuclear advocate here. With radiation, people often conflate measureable with hazardous. But when you can measure a single nucleus decaying there are like 20 orders of magnitude between them. Radioactive cleanup article often fail to mention that we don't see biological harm with doses less than 100 mSv acute or 300 mSv over a long period of time. Articles without mSv in them are borderline meaningless. Anyway even with some historical cleanup issues, the facts remain that 8 million people die per year due to air pollution from fossil and renewable biofuel combustion, climate change is happening due to atmospheric CO2 emissions, nuclear power has among the lowest possible cradle-to-grave CO2 emissions per kWh, we are about 80% fossil fueled today, and nuclear accidents cause far less life and environmental harm than fossil/biofuel. That's why lots of people like nuclear. Coal kills a Chernobyl worth of people every 8 hours while operating normally and has to pay nothing for it. Think about that.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  The problem with all those assumptions is that the "radiological harm" is cumulative and it can accumulate in unexpected ways which aren't random. For example some isotopes enrich in certain organs and then do their damage for a long time. And there's no good framework for treating or checking "acceptable" risks for example with radioactive dirt or whatever. Russian soldiers dug trenches in the hot zone in Tschernobyl just this year. Do we expect people to remember these sites for the next few millenia? The same goes for any potential spill of radioactive material, and that's why long term storage is such a difficult problem. We don't want any to get out, because we'll never be able to tell who gets what dose. And "nuclear advocates" like to say coal, preferrably burned in the least effective or safe way, is the only alternative to nuclear power. Which it's not, of course. They like to forget that replacing coal (and other fossil fuels) means an extreme scaleup in access to radioactive material, thereby scaling up the risks. Especially those from bad intentions, but accidents can't be calculated either. They like to forget that while not that many people die even in major accidents, that's just because a large area is evacuated and cleaned up. At horrendous cost. The Fukushima cleanup may reach a trillion Dollar in cost, btw.

arethuza 4y ago

Air cooled nuclear reactors - what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot as it turns out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

karencarits 4y ago
Not to downplay the significance of this disaster, but this is one of the worst nuclear accidents we know - yet "It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal". Not all dams are used for power, of course, but the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam[0] is estimated to have killed 171 000 I guess all infrastructure implies some degree of risk to life and health [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
- arethuza 4y ago
  Yes - I've got the book "Atomic Accidents" and it starts with a description of a disaster at a Russian hydro plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_station_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_stat...
- yabones 4y ago
  I think a big part of what makes people so afraid of radiation is how easy it is to detect. Imagine if you had a geiger counter that detected Dioxin, Benzine, or PFAS contamination? It would be going off pretty much constantly. You can detect radioactive materials with a cheap detector, where you need an entire lab to find regular poisons, which doesn't help with our lack of ability to assess risk. For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house. They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning Teflon cookware. It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the entire history of atomic power production. But most people don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel factory that they do to a nuclear power station.

bayesian_horse 4y ago

Somehow this is rarely as fast or cheap as planned.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Often in part because people conflate measurable with hazardous with radiation. If the goal was to allow double the natural dose rates then it would be a lot easier. You need about 20x the natural dose rate for a year before you see an increase in cancer incidence from 42% baseline to 43%. https://whatisnuclear.com/dose-calc.html https://whatisnuclear.com/dose-calc.html
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Given that the goal is 0 and there are plenty of ongoing activities, poorly cleaned up spills, contaminated mining towns, and legacies of carelessness related to the nuclear sector that result in 2-200x background in various pockets, it seems like 0 was a pretty good benchmark and should maybe be reduced a little.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  There is no meaningful difference between measurable and hazardous radiation. You never know where the stuff builds up. Some isotopes get enriched in some organs and do damage over a long time. Depending on what the material actually is, it can get into unfortunate places and stay there for a few years, irradiating someone. It can get into the food supply doing some more damage than anticipated. None of that is calculateable, so it is better to treat every radiation as a risk. You also forget that workers may be wearing a dosimeter, but average people don't. They'd never know. You can easily reach the 20x increase if you have a contaminated object in your home or car or whatever, even if that contamination isn't that strong.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    This might be a good read for you. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/11340/beir_vii_final.pdf https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/11340/beir_vii_fi...

jen729w 4y ago

Tangentially related, but as everyone here seems to enjoy talk of nuclear [things], it’s worth a recommendation: Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel ‘On the Beach’. If you want high-level spoilers, Wikipedia is your friend. I shan’t say a word other than that it’s a terrific little book that I can’t believe I’d never heard of. I just read it last week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)

bwestergard 4y ago

This is notably one of the locations mentioned in Kraftwerk's "Radioactivität" lyrics.