The most recent estimate by the Public Accounts Committee is that decommissioning the United Kingdom’s nuclear sites will cost over £132 billion and take more than 120 years; therefore, can the government justify a new nuclear program if it will cost this much to clean up the last one?
If it weren’t for the continual blaring of our radiation sensors, the structure would resemble any other aging industrial facility.
In reality, though, we are standing in one of the world’s largest and most unstable nuclear waste dumps, left over from the UK’s Cold War-era rush to create nuclear energy and atomic bombs.
The Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS) near Sellafield, Cumbria, has been labeled the most dangerous structure in Western Europe.
Even Sellafield Ltd, which currently manages the facility on the taxpayer’s behalf, does not contest the depiction.
The nuclear regulator, ONR, has deemed the structure “an unbearable hazard.”
Now engineers are beginning to get it.
We are observing as they prepare to lower a robotic grabber into one of the trash silos to retrieve the first nuclear waste batches.
The radiation below is shielded from us and the robot’s operator by a pane made of thick lead glass. It resembles a carnival grabber, but instead of a stuffed animal, the prize is a bucket of highly radioactive waste.
The team of British engineers who created the “retrievals machine” feel a mixture of pride and relief.
Finally, they may begin emptying the building and transporting the trash to a modern waste facility.
The head of the retrieval program, Chris Halliwell, remarked, “It’s such a momentous day.”
Mr. Halliwell has committed a large portion of his career to evacuate the building, which is regarded as the only way to render it safe.
The MSSS building was constructed in the late 1950s to receive waste from the expanding fleet of nuclear reactors in the United Kingdom.
For decades, the trash has been disintegrating into a highly radioactive sludge that emits hydrogen gas into the air – a potentially explosive mixture that requires continual ventilation.
In 2019, due to the building’s deterioration, radiation began flowing into soil that had been poisoned in the 1970s.
It will not be an easy task. The grabber collects less than one cubic meter of trash per scoop.
Mr. Halliwell stated, “It’s like emptying a wheelie bin with a teaspoon.”
The duration of the project is estimated to be at least twenty years, however, time moves differently at Sellafield.
Our next stop is the structure that will house the MSSS’s repackaged garbage for the next century.
The Box Encapsulation Plant Product Store (BEPPS) is a gigantic concrete tomb with walls that are more than two meters thick, served by an underground tunnel and robotic cranes that can transport garbage in purpose-built boxes into the store without humans having to come into contact with it.
The reverberating tube will eventually connect eight vaults that can store the majority of Sellafield’s waste until a new “geological storage” facility is constructed to house it permanently.
Within a few weeks, the new facility will be ready for occupancy. We will be among the last humans to enter the tunnel for a century.
The removal of waste from the MSSS building is a momentous occasion for Sellafield Ltd., but the expenses of dealing with the nuclear legacy of the Cold War are enormous.
The annual cost of nuclear decommissioning to the taxpayer exceeds £3 billion. The cleanup of Sellafield alone is estimated to cost £97 billion over the next 120 years.
Can the government justify a new nuclear program if it costs this much to decommission the previous one? And can the industry be relied upon to clean up the costly mess left at Sellafield?
Phil Hallington, the head of policy at Sellafield, stated, “At the time, the focus was the military, followed by the rise of civilian nuclear power, which left us with legacy issues.
New nuclear facilities must raise funds to pay for their own decommissioning, so the public should not, at least in theory, be on the hook.
Mr. Hallington stated, “We must uphold our end of the agreement at Sellafield to maintain trust.”
