7 ms·

Sellafield: Europe’s most toxic nuclear site

78 points by philk10 3y ago

rapnie 3y ago
Also see today's "Sellafield nuclear site hacked by groups linked to Russia and China" article in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-nuclear-site-hacked-groups-russia-china https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-...
andyjohnson0 3y ago
"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." Frightening on many dimensions
- mschuster91 3y ago
  The most astonishing part about it is just how many pro-nuclear people here or on Twitter and Reddit ignore the fiscal risks associated with nuclear - not just the obvious aspects of worst-case liabilities or long-term secure storage, but also stuff like this.
  - digging 3y ago
    I don't think that's fair. Anti-nuclear comments also widely ignore the fiscal risks and focus on the obvious issues. Most people probably don't know about the financial issues.
    - cycomanic 3y ago
      I think that's not entirely true. Much of the discussion about nuclear has shifted away from the usual talking points and shifted towards costs. The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        > The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost. Because it's the easiest one to make, and most importantly, the easiest one to prove. Talking about cancer rates and whatnot, there's many a way to debate oneself to death about which study has greater trustability... but no way around the numbers: dealing with the waste is expensive, acquiring the fuel is expensive (and incredibly damaging to the environment), constructing NPPs is expensive and a multi-decade project, operating them is expensive, insuring them is expensive (or one runs the Soviet Russia model and has the government/tax payer as the insurance of last resort), keeping them and the fuel secure is expensive (which is an issue with the much-hyped small reactors - a prime target for any terrorist looking for some material for a dirty bomb), and taking them apart is expensive. Nuclear power is only so "cheap" because of the extremely long life of a NPP and because a lot of the mentioned expensive parts has been externalized or not properly accounted for at all.
    - hgomersall 3y ago
      The "financial" issues in this context is just a placeholder for "shit loads of resources". As always with spending at the state level, the billions needed are just representative of the opportunity cost.
  - Gare 3y ago
    Isn't Sellafield mostly a consequence of rushing to acquire the atomic and hydrogen bomb as quickly as possible? Akin to Hanaford site in the USA.
    - brightsize 3y ago
      *Hanford.
    - NikkiA 3y ago
      Not really, no. The Butex process ran at sellafield from 1951 to 1964, only the period of 1951 to 1958 was producing material for the UK nuclear weapons program, after the successful hydrogen bomb tests the UK signed an agreement to a) use US nuclear warheads in UK bombs/missiles, and b) provide the US with plutonium from sellfield in return. The Purex process, which ran from 1964 til last year at the Magnox plant, and til 2018 at the THORP plant for AGR reprocessing, was the reprocessing process that replaced it, and only ever provided nuclear material to the US*, the UK never used it domestically. * I'm not 100% sure on this, since several EU nations used Sellafield/THORP to process their waste, I would imagine France at least wanted their plutonium for their own nuclear weapons back, but I don't know to what extent France used sellafield vs their own reprocessing facility in Marcoule
  - snakeyjake 3y ago
    The extreme cost of Sellafield is due to waste and accidents from the UK's nuclear weapons program, not its commercial power generation program. The vast, overwhelming, majority of waste was created by processing nuclear fuel into plutonium (and other radioactive elements) for bombs. The UK was under enormous pressure in the 50s and 60s to keep up with both the US and USSR so they cut tons of corners to have a domestic bomb. The article "for some reason" conflates the two: the waste from their nuclear weapons research and development and (extremely minimal) environmental impact of commercial power generation.
    - trebligdivad 3y ago
      I think to be fair some of it was also due to stuff done in the early days of figuring commercial power out; but that was a long time ago. Sellafield has taught a lot of people what's needed to do it properly.
      - u320 3y ago
        Even that was using technology which haven't seen much use outside the UK. They were never truly commercial, supporting the nuclear weapons program was a requirement from day 1 and was the reason for some design choices that was suboptimal for power generation.
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      Why did the UK want to keep up with the US?
      - saulrh 3y ago
        Because if you try to depend on the US's nuclear umbrella you end up like Ukraine.
        avar 3y ago
        No, the UK was in NATO, and if it didn't develop its own nuclear weapons in could have easily convinced the Americans to give them nukes for deterrence purposes, as the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy etc. did. The real reason is that the UK (and France) wanted and still want a seat an the big boy's table. I.e. the UN security council etc.
  - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    Maybe we know the full story. Sad to see this sort of alarmist “journalism” from a publication that aligns with green energy.
- gorgoiler 3y ago
  I can never wrap my head around why costs like this are so high. If you consider most industrial processes involve digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into something else, and that work is done by people using machines built by other people also made of stuff dug out the ground then the cost must surely be bounded by bits of land you have to dig up and people you have to pay to do stuff. It’s not like cleaning up Sellafield requires a 100 high stack of Da Vinci paintings or anything else artificially rare like that. So with £60k salaries all round costing the employer £120k in total and a 25 year work schedule — that’s £3m per worker. Does that mean 90k people are involved? Maybe the only part of this that’s so crazy is the 25 year project timeline? By contrast the British Armed Forces must be employing about the same number of people over about the same amount of time?
  - saulrh 3y ago
    I imagine that a lot of that cost is project and timeline risk mitigation - what happens if people NIMBY you repeatedly and demand ever more insane mitigation protocols and you end up having to move to Antarctica to build a space program for launching the top ten meters of the entire British Isles into Sagittarius A*.
    - gizajob 3y ago
      Could also build a giant granite pyramid over the entire site. Should keep the Cumbrians in wages for a couple of hundred years.
      - u320 3y ago
        It wouldn't surprise me if that actually increased the amount of radioactivity released.
  - seren 3y ago
    I remember an example from another nuclear site cleanup. If you work on a part potentially contaminated you cannot used a normal vacuum cleaner that will disperse some contaminated dust, so you need a special purpose device. Then you cannot dispose easily of the dust, so you need another process. Since the device is also critical you probably need some regular maintenance or tests, so you need someone to manage them. So basically every single step is much more complex with the associated cost.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  When I read stuff like that I am a bit irritated because it doesn't inform the reader that there are much less expensive ways to "clean up" these facilities. The problem with those cheaper ways is that they lock up the nuclear isotopes in a way that prevents them from being reprocessed into new fuel or recycled into weapons again. Back in 1985 there was an interesting demonstration of vitrification[1] which I felt was pretty cool. And if you seal this glass inside a steel case (which keeps all the alpha/beta decay products inside) you're basically left with slightly warm stackable steel things that emit zero radiation. But they can't be (easily) post processed back into concentrated nuclear materials. [1] https://physicsworld.com/a/a-glassy-solution-to-nuclear-waste/ https://physicsworld.com/a/a-glassy-solution-to-nuclear-wast...
  - jcrawfordor 3y ago
    I'm not sure what you're referring to, it's not typical to preserve isotopes during cleanup activities. The cleanup process mostly involves packaging contaminated items to bury them. This process is dangerous and must be done with extensive protective equipment, which makes it very slow and time consuming. The isotopes involved here aren't useful anyway. We're talking about everything from gloves to concrete walls that have been contaminated with daughter products. What I think you're referring to is processing of spent fuel, which is a smaller item in these types of projects since the spent fuel is already packaged for storage. I'm not an expert on the UK situation but I wouldn't be surprised if spent fuel management is a tiny portion or not included in that estimate at all, it's usually already covered out of operating budgets.
- stevesimmons 3y ago
  The cost of fossil fuels is equally frightening if you cost cleaning up its emissions in the same way. Nuclear only looks so bad because we ignore the externalities of the alternatives we currently price based on just extraction cost.
  - Klinky 3y ago
    Nuclear & fossil fuels both look bad when considering long-term sequestration of their waste. That said many of these sites are so polluted due to fast & loose early nuclear weapons programs.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      Sellafield’s toxicity comes from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into plutonium for nuclear weapons. Using that as evidence that commercial nuclear energy waste is expensive or complex to handle seems disingenuous. Also the costs given are total over the span of 100 years. That’s quite a pittance from the perspective of annual government cash flow. You don’t need to sequester things long term for nuclear. First, waste has lots of uses and isn’t just discarded (eg medical applications). Secondly, we will build breeder reactors which can reuse spent fuel decreasing radioactivity further. Also, the most radioactive waste decays very quickly and the remainder isn’t as toxic. Most of the complexity of water management is that people hear “radioactive waste” and instantly enter NIMBY fear mode instead of figuring out how to manage the risks. But sure, if we strangle nuclear then we’ll never improve our ability to solve and mitigate problems associated with energy production.
      - Klinky 3y ago
        You clearly did not read the second sentence in my tiny comment. Hand wavy nuclear apologia is what's actually incredibly disingenuous. You don't just need to keep tabs on it for 100 years. Much longer & ideally in a coordinated fashion. If there's such demand for nuclear waste, why aren't companies making bank off of it? The demand isn't as high as you think. We'll build magical breeder reactors that aren't actually commercially viable & use reprocessing facilities with the same process drawbacks that created some of these messes in the first place? Sounds like a bad idea. Poo pooing the fears and dangers of nuclear is how we got into this mess where nuclear has a bad rap, deservedly so, from very poor management of very powerful substances. The realities are that nuclear is incredibly complex & costly to implement & manage in a way where its full potential is realized. That's not a reason we shouldn't do it, but let's stop pretending commercial nuclear is viable.
efitz 3y ago
I have no doubt costs are high (after all, it’s a government project and it has the word “nuclear” in the name). That said, the article reads like anti-nuclear fear mongering: “SEE! This is why we have to ban nuclear power because nuclear waste cannot be stored safely!” I am strongly pro-nuclear as part of a green energy strategy; it’s very clean and runs when the sun isn’t shining and when the wind isn’t blowing. I think it is more expensive than it needs to be due to over-regulation and NIMBY lawsuits. I think in the US at least we had a very sound solution (Yucca Mountain) for storing nuclear waste, again killed by NIMBY.
- avar 3y ago
  Arguably the most sensible solution to nuclear waste is dissolving it in the ocean. But you can see the response to the Fukushima wastewater release for a hint at the sort of massive hissy fit people would throw about that.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Why would we do that? Nuclear waste can be reprocessed into more fuel and medical applications and other use cases instead of just throwing it away.
    - avar 3y ago
      It can, but it's uneconomical except for some niche applications, and breeders also come with their own proliferation concerns. Most nuclear waste is being warehoused. So, a reason to do it is because it would be cheap and safe if done correctly. If you look at e.g. [1] you'll see that we generate around 100k TBq/y of waste. Just the radiation from natural potassium 40 in the ocean is 14,000,000x10^15 Bq. So if we dumped all the nuclear waste the world produces in a year into the ocean it would be just 0.0007% of the radioactivity we're already getting from only that natural potassium 40. We could keep it up for 1400 years before it would be a 1% addition. We're killing around 5 million a year from fossil fuel use. Anything that makes nuclear cheaper is a good thing in that scenario, and storing waste costs a lot of money. 1. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1591_web.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1591_web.p... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
thriftwy 3y ago
When I was growing up, my granddad had a row of a weird black raspberry. It had huge, berries with a distinct taste, and all the assorted insects always present on other raspberries never showed up on these ones. They also never got moldy. He said the variety is called Cumberland. Now I can't stop wondering about any connection to that nuclear waste.
- saulrh 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwbadubadu 3y ago
    Yes, because we would have had that quick and clean and easy and cheap way out of all the mess, so simple, but everybody stupid blaming everything on nucular, and now boom, climate catastrophe!
    - saulrh 3y ago
      Yes, actually, widespread top-down deployment of nuclear power would have been a safe and economical way to transition gracefully off of fossil fuel power starting in the 1970s.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Safe? If you take the number of failures as a constant fraction of the total you'd have that many more disasters or near disasters, and if the numbers get large enough you'd probably start to see actual meltdowns, we came close enough a couple of times as it was. And then the costs: Those are the plants that we have no idea of how to decommission them properly without incurring a cost penalty that invariably makes them too expensive to operate after the fact. And nobody wants to actually pay for it, they're passed around like hot potatoes. For the latest generation that's a maybe.
        saulrh 3y ago
csours 3y ago
Is Chernobyl/Pripyat not in Europe?
- epistasis 3y ago
  Some might say that there's an ongoing war to determine the answer to this question. Edit: but to be clear, I am not part of those "some," and believe Ukraine is Europe! I just don't know the relative scales of Sellafield and Chernobyl in terms of toxicity.
  - toyg 3y ago
    Russia is also Europe, in the traditional sense. Before the Cold War, this was never in doubt. The ruler was literally a "Caesar", elites spoke French and German, holidayed on the French Riviera, and bickered with other European powers in the Great Game.
    - KptMarchewa 3y ago
      The elites were trying to fit in into that world extremely hard, but the ruling method was always самодержавие.
      - toyg 3y ago
        Well, until WWI that was largely the ruling method of choice across the entire continent, eh...
- sgift 3y ago
  It's an interesting question whether Chernobyl or Sellafield are more toxic, especially with all the additional toxic waste that's send to Sellafield all the time.
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    both are toxic enough
paulsmith 3y ago
I first learned about Sellafield when I tried to decipher what name Kraftwerk was saying in their song "Radio-Activity" (along with Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Harrisburg (Three Mile Island)) https://youtu.be/X--F5b5IdqU?si=P6DoR6-VXUC1b50I https://youtu.be/X--F5b5IdqU?si=P6DoR6-VXUC1b50I
- teddyh 3y ago
  Those phrases, and more, were not in the original version of the song. They were added in the version of the song on the 1991 remix album “The Mix”. This changed the theme (but not the music itself) significantly from the original 1975 version, which did not contain any anti-nuclear propaganda, and instead was about literal radio, as in a medium for communication. I remember being slightly annoyed by the change as being very on-the-nose, and in effect disappearing the more interesting subject about the potential for radio as a medium for communication between people.
  - Erratic6576 3y ago
    so they titled a song “Radioaktivität” but they blatantly skipped talking about radioactivity and only spoke about radio activity? I would have thought they’d be more subtle
    - jonsen 3y ago
      It is subtle. 'Radio activity' is one word, the same word, in German.
    - xattt 3y ago
      Anti-nuclear sentiment was low, given that TMI and Chernobyl had not happened yet.
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  I had exactly the same experience and just skimmed the comments for a mention of this before posting.. Pretty cynical from my side. But re: Kraftwerk: that tune is pretty good IMO! I like the original as well as the 90s remix and discovered both of them as a kid. The soothing ethereal synth melodies and the scary theme of the title go so well together, eerily.
jcrawfordor 3y ago
Sellafield is historically most directly comparable to the Hanford Reservation in the US (southeastern Washington), about which you could say most of the same things: one of the largest contamination sites, with an extremely long and expensive remediation timeline.
- treadmill 3y ago
  It really is not comparable. Sellafield also does spent fuel reprocessing and, like all nuclear energy production, poisons the environment during regular operation: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/nov/20/paulbrown https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/nov/20/paulbrown
  - jcrawfordor 3y ago
    I would emphasize _historically_, but as a matter of interest, the Hanford site hosts multiple currently-operating reactors (including CGS and several research reactors) and contains the fuel processing reactor FFTF - it has been shut down for a couple of decades now but there is some ongoing interest in resuming operation.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
z303 3y ago
Previously known as Windscale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcsyMvQtlKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcsyMvQtlKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOgSlFkv71U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOgSlFkv71U
- NikkiA 3y ago
  The naming issue is complicated, Windscale was a different set of plants (including Calder Hall) adjoining the set of plants referred to as Sellafield. Referring to the whole site near Seascale as either Windscale or Sellafield has always been 'incorrect', but something the media has done forever.

78 points by philk10 3y ago

Also see today's "Sellafield nuclear site hacked by groups linked to Russia and China" article in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-nuclear-site-hacked-groups-russia-china https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-...

andyjohnson0 3y ago

"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." Frightening on many dimensions

mschuster91 3y ago
The most astonishing part about it is just how many pro-nuclear people here or on Twitter and Reddit ignore the fiscal risks associated with nuclear - not just the obvious aspects of worst-case liabilities or long-term secure storage, but also stuff like this.
- digging 3y ago
  I don't think that's fair. Anti-nuclear comments also widely ignore the fiscal risks and focus on the obvious issues. Most people probably don't know about the financial issues.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    I think that's not entirely true. Much of the discussion about nuclear has shifted away from the usual talking points and shifted towards costs. The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost. Because it's the easiest one to make, and most importantly, the easiest one to prove. Talking about cancer rates and whatnot, there's many a way to debate oneself to death about which study has greater trustability... but no way around the numbers: dealing with the waste is expensive, acquiring the fuel is expensive (and incredibly damaging to the environment), constructing NPPs is expensive and a multi-decade project, operating them is expensive, insuring them is expensive (or one runs the Soviet Russia model and has the government/tax payer as the insurance of last resort), keeping them and the fuel secure is expensive (which is an issue with the much-hyped small reactors - a prime target for any terrorist looking for some material for a dirty bomb), and taking them apart is expensive. Nuclear power is only so "cheap" because of the extremely long life of a NPP and because a lot of the mentioned expensive parts has been externalized or not properly accounted for at all.
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    The "financial" issues in this context is just a placeholder for "shit loads of resources". As always with spending at the state level, the billions needed are just representative of the opportunity cost.
- Gare 3y ago
  Isn't Sellafield mostly a consequence of rushing to acquire the atomic and hydrogen bomb as quickly as possible? Akin to Hanaford site in the USA.
  - brightsize 3y ago
    *Hanford.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    Not really, no. The Butex process ran at sellafield from 1951 to 1964, only the period of 1951 to 1958 was producing material for the UK nuclear weapons program, after the successful hydrogen bomb tests the UK signed an agreement to a) use US nuclear warheads in UK bombs/missiles, and b) provide the US with plutonium from sellfield in return. The Purex process, which ran from 1964 til last year at the Magnox plant, and til 2018 at the THORP plant for AGR reprocessing, was the reprocessing process that replaced it, and only ever provided nuclear material to the US*, the UK never used it domestically. * I'm not 100% sure on this, since several EU nations used Sellafield/THORP to process their waste, I would imagine France at least wanted their plutonium for their own nuclear weapons back, but I don't know to what extent France used sellafield vs their own reprocessing facility in Marcoule
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  The extreme cost of Sellafield is due to waste and accidents from the UK's nuclear weapons program, not its commercial power generation program. The vast, overwhelming, majority of waste was created by processing nuclear fuel into plutonium (and other radioactive elements) for bombs. The UK was under enormous pressure in the 50s and 60s to keep up with both the US and USSR so they cut tons of corners to have a domestic bomb. The article "for some reason" conflates the two: the waste from their nuclear weapons research and development and (extremely minimal) environmental impact of commercial power generation.
  - trebligdivad 3y ago
    I think to be fair some of it was also due to stuff done in the early days of figuring commercial power out; but that was a long time ago. Sellafield has taught a lot of people what's needed to do it properly.
    - u320 3y ago
      Even that was using technology which haven't seen much use outside the UK. They were never truly commercial, supporting the nuclear weapons program was a requirement from day 1 and was the reason for some design choices that was suboptimal for power generation.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Why did the UK want to keep up with the US?
    - saulrh 3y ago
      Because if you try to depend on the US's nuclear umbrella you end up like Ukraine.
      - avar 3y ago
        No, the UK was in NATO, and if it didn't develop its own nuclear weapons in could have easily convinced the Americans to give them nukes for deterrence purposes, as the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy etc. did. The real reason is that the UK (and France) wanted and still want a seat an the big boy's table. I.e. the UN security council etc.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Maybe we know the full story. Sad to see this sort of alarmist “journalism” from a publication that aligns with green energy.
gorgoiler 3y ago
I can never wrap my head around why costs like this are so high. If you consider most industrial processes involve digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into something else, and that work is done by people using machines built by other people also made of stuff dug out the ground then the cost must surely be bounded by bits of land you have to dig up and people you have to pay to do stuff. It’s not like cleaning up Sellafield requires a 100 high stack of Da Vinci paintings or anything else artificially rare like that. So with £60k salaries all round costing the employer £120k in total and a 25 year work schedule — that’s £3m per worker. Does that mean 90k people are involved? Maybe the only part of this that’s so crazy is the 25 year project timeline? By contrast the British Armed Forces must be employing about the same number of people over about the same amount of time?
- saulrh 3y ago
  I imagine that a lot of that cost is project and timeline risk mitigation - what happens if people NIMBY you repeatedly and demand ever more insane mitigation protocols and you end up having to move to Antarctica to build a space program for launching the top ten meters of the entire British Isles into Sagittarius A*.
  - gizajob 3y ago
    Could also build a giant granite pyramid over the entire site. Should keep the Cumbrians in wages for a couple of hundred years.
    - u320 3y ago
      It wouldn't surprise me if that actually increased the amount of radioactivity released.
- seren 3y ago
  I remember an example from another nuclear site cleanup. If you work on a part potentially contaminated you cannot used a normal vacuum cleaner that will disperse some contaminated dust, so you need a special purpose device. Then you cannot dispose easily of the dust, so you need another process. Since the device is also critical you probably need some regular maintenance or tests, so you need someone to manage them. So basically every single step is much more complex with the associated cost.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
When I read stuff like that I am a bit irritated because it doesn't inform the reader that there are much less expensive ways to "clean up" these facilities. The problem with those cheaper ways is that they lock up the nuclear isotopes in a way that prevents them from being reprocessed into new fuel or recycled into weapons again. Back in 1985 there was an interesting demonstration of vitrification[1] which I felt was pretty cool. And if you seal this glass inside a steel case (which keeps all the alpha/beta decay products inside) you're basically left with slightly warm stackable steel things that emit zero radiation. But they can't be (easily) post processed back into concentrated nuclear materials. [1] https://physicsworld.com/a/a-glassy-solution-to-nuclear-waste/ https://physicsworld.com/a/a-glassy-solution-to-nuclear-wast...
- jcrawfordor 3y ago
  I'm not sure what you're referring to, it's not typical to preserve isotopes during cleanup activities. The cleanup process mostly involves packaging contaminated items to bury them. This process is dangerous and must be done with extensive protective equipment, which makes it very slow and time consuming. The isotopes involved here aren't useful anyway. We're talking about everything from gloves to concrete walls that have been contaminated with daughter products. What I think you're referring to is processing of spent fuel, which is a smaller item in these types of projects since the spent fuel is already packaged for storage. I'm not an expert on the UK situation but I wouldn't be surprised if spent fuel management is a tiny portion or not included in that estimate at all, it's usually already covered out of operating budgets.
stevesimmons 3y ago
The cost of fossil fuels is equally frightening if you cost cleaning up its emissions in the same way. Nuclear only looks so bad because we ignore the externalities of the alternatives we currently price based on just extraction cost.
- Klinky 3y ago
  Nuclear & fossil fuels both look bad when considering long-term sequestration of their waste. That said many of these sites are so polluted due to fast & loose early nuclear weapons programs.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Sellafield’s toxicity comes from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into plutonium for nuclear weapons. Using that as evidence that commercial nuclear energy waste is expensive or complex to handle seems disingenuous. Also the costs given are total over the span of 100 years. That’s quite a pittance from the perspective of annual government cash flow. You don’t need to sequester things long term for nuclear. First, waste has lots of uses and isn’t just discarded (eg medical applications). Secondly, we will build breeder reactors which can reuse spent fuel decreasing radioactivity further. Also, the most radioactive waste decays very quickly and the remainder isn’t as toxic. Most of the complexity of water management is that people hear “radioactive waste” and instantly enter NIMBY fear mode instead of figuring out how to manage the risks. But sure, if we strangle nuclear then we’ll never improve our ability to solve and mitigate problems associated with energy production.
    - Klinky 3y ago
      You clearly did not read the second sentence in my tiny comment. Hand wavy nuclear apologia is what's actually incredibly disingenuous. You don't just need to keep tabs on it for 100 years. Much longer & ideally in a coordinated fashion. If there's such demand for nuclear waste, why aren't companies making bank off of it? The demand isn't as high as you think. We'll build magical breeder reactors that aren't actually commercially viable & use reprocessing facilities with the same process drawbacks that created some of these messes in the first place? Sounds like a bad idea. Poo pooing the fears and dangers of nuclear is how we got into this mess where nuclear has a bad rap, deservedly so, from very poor management of very powerful substances. The realities are that nuclear is incredibly complex & costly to implement & manage in a way where its full potential is realized. That's not a reason we shouldn't do it, but let's stop pretending commercial nuclear is viable.

efitz 3y ago

I have no doubt costs are high (after all, it’s a government project and it has the word “nuclear” in the name). That said, the article reads like anti-nuclear fear mongering: “SEE! This is why we have to ban nuclear power because nuclear waste cannot be stored safely!” I am strongly pro-nuclear as part of a green energy strategy; it’s very clean and runs when the sun isn’t shining and when the wind isn’t blowing. I think it is more expensive than it needs to be due to over-regulation and NIMBY lawsuits. I think in the US at least we had a very sound solution (Yucca Mountain) for storing nuclear waste, again killed by NIMBY.

avar 3y ago
Arguably the most sensible solution to nuclear waste is dissolving it in the ocean. But you can see the response to the Fukushima wastewater release for a hint at the sort of massive hissy fit people would throw about that.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Why would we do that? Nuclear waste can be reprocessed into more fuel and medical applications and other use cases instead of just throwing it away.
  - avar 3y ago
    It can, but it's uneconomical except for some niche applications, and breeders also come with their own proliferation concerns. Most nuclear waste is being warehoused. So, a reason to do it is because it would be cheap and safe if done correctly. If you look at e.g. [1] you'll see that we generate around 100k TBq/y of waste. Just the radiation from natural potassium 40 in the ocean is 14,000,000x10^15 Bq. So if we dumped all the nuclear waste the world produces in a year into the ocean it would be just 0.0007% of the radioactivity we're already getting from only that natural potassium 40. We could keep it up for 1400 years before it would be a 1% addition. We're killing around 5 million a year from fossil fuel use. Anything that makes nuclear cheaper is a good thing in that scenario, and storing waste costs a lot of money. 1. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1591_web.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1591_web.p... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...

thriftwy 3y ago

When I was growing up, my granddad had a row of a weird black raspberry. It had huge, berries with a distinct taste, and all the assorted insects always present on other raspberries never showed up on these ones. They also never got moldy. He said the variety is called Cumberland. Now I can't stop wondering about any connection to that nuclear waste.

saulrh 3y ago
[flagged]
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  Yes, because we would have had that quick and clean and easy and cheap way out of all the mess, so simple, but everybody stupid blaming everything on nucular, and now boom, climate catastrophe!
  - saulrh 3y ago
    Yes, actually, widespread top-down deployment of nuclear power would have been a safe and economical way to transition gracefully off of fossil fuel power starting in the 1970s.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Safe? If you take the number of failures as a constant fraction of the total you'd have that many more disasters or near disasters, and if the numbers get large enough you'd probably start to see actual meltdowns, we came close enough a couple of times as it was. And then the costs: Those are the plants that we have no idea of how to decommission them properly without incurring a cost penalty that invariably makes them too expensive to operate after the fact. And nobody wants to actually pay for it, they're passed around like hot potatoes. For the latest generation that's a maybe.
      - saulrh 3y ago

csours 3y ago

Is Chernobyl/Pripyat not in Europe?

epistasis 3y ago
Some might say that there's an ongoing war to determine the answer to this question. Edit: but to be clear, I am not part of those "some," and believe Ukraine is Europe! I just don't know the relative scales of Sellafield and Chernobyl in terms of toxicity.
- toyg 3y ago
  Russia is also Europe, in the traditional sense. Before the Cold War, this was never in doubt. The ruler was literally a "Caesar", elites spoke French and German, holidayed on the French Riviera, and bickered with other European powers in the Great Game.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    The elites were trying to fit in into that world extremely hard, but the ruling method was always самодержавие.
    - toyg 3y ago
      Well, until WWI that was largely the ruling method of choice across the entire continent, eh...
sgift 3y ago
It's an interesting question whether Chernobyl or Sellafield are more toxic, especially with all the additional toxic waste that's send to Sellafield all the time.
- pvaldes 3y ago
  both are toxic enough

paulsmith 3y ago

I first learned about Sellafield when I tried to decipher what name Kraftwerk was saying in their song "Radio-Activity" (along with Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Harrisburg (Three Mile Island)) https://youtu.be/X--F5b5IdqU?si=P6DoR6-VXUC1b50I https://youtu.be/X--F5b5IdqU?si=P6DoR6-VXUC1b50I

teddyh 3y ago
Those phrases, and more, were not in the original version of the song. They were added in the version of the song on the 1991 remix album “The Mix”. This changed the theme (but not the music itself) significantly from the original 1975 version, which did not contain any anti-nuclear propaganda, and instead was about literal radio, as in a medium for communication. I remember being slightly annoyed by the change as being very on-the-nose, and in effect disappearing the more interesting subject about the potential for radio as a medium for communication between people.
- Erratic6576 3y ago
  so they titled a song “Radioaktivität” but they blatantly skipped talking about radioactivity and only spoke about radio activity? I would have thought they’d be more subtle
  - jonsen 3y ago
    It is subtle. 'Radio activity' is one word, the same word, in German.
  - xattt 3y ago
    Anti-nuclear sentiment was low, given that TMI and Chernobyl had not happened yet.
moritzwarhier 3y ago
I had exactly the same experience and just skimmed the comments for a mention of this before posting.. Pretty cynical from my side. But re: Kraftwerk: that tune is pretty good IMO! I like the original as well as the 90s remix and discovered both of them as a kid. The soothing ethereal synth melodies and the scary theme of the title go so well together, eerily.

jcrawfordor 3y ago

Sellafield is historically most directly comparable to the Hanford Reservation in the US (southeastern Washington), about which you could say most of the same things: one of the largest contamination sites, with an extremely long and expensive remediation timeline.

treadmill 3y ago
It really is not comparable. Sellafield also does spent fuel reprocessing and, like all nuclear energy production, poisons the environment during regular operation: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/nov/20/paulbrown https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/nov/20/paulbrown
- jcrawfordor 3y ago
  I would emphasize _historically_, but as a matter of interest, the Hanford site hosts multiple currently-operating reactors (including CGS and several research reactors) and contains the fuel processing reactor FFTF - it has been shut down for a couple of decades now but there is some ongoing interest in resuming operation.

deleted 3y ago

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z303 3y ago

Previously known as Windscale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcsyMvQtlKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcsyMvQtlKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOgSlFkv71U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOgSlFkv71U

NikkiA 3y ago
The naming issue is complicated, Windscale was a different set of plants (including Calder Hall) adjoining the set of plants referred to as Sellafield. Referring to the whole site near Seascale as either Windscale or Sellafield has always been 'incorrect', but something the media has done forever.