Safely disposing of nuclear waste is an expensive business. The annual clean-up cost at Sellafield, the UK's main nuclear reprocessing and decommissioning site, is £1.9 billion. The 6km2 facility in Cumbria handles nearly all the radioactive waste generated by the UK's 15 operational nuclear reactors.
Read more: Inside Sellafield: how the UK's most dangerous nuclear site is cleaning up its act
So, on a sunny afternoon, WIRED finds itself staring at Europe's most dangerous industrial building. "That one there's the second most dangerous," says Andrew Cooney, technical manager at Sellafield, nodding in the direction of another innocuous-looking structure.
Sellafield is also an unnerving reminder of the UK's nuclear past. It hosts one of the world's largest inventories of untreated radioactive waste, including 140 tonnes of civil plutonium. "This is a 60-year-old building, records are non-existent," says Rich Davey, a mechanical responsible engineer at Sellafield, referring to a vast labyrinth of labs once used to test nuclear material.
Inside the cramped, crumbling facility, open ponds of radioactive material sit alongside rusting power stations and research stations dating back to the 50s. "Often, we're fumbling in the dark to find out what's in there," says Davey.
WIRED was given rare access to see how Sellafield operates.
The Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) handles spent fuel from UK and overseas nuclear facilities. The material is bought in by train, with a 150-tonne crane lifting out flasks of spent fuel. This waste fuel is stored in huge, temperature-regulated ponds for between three and five years. Robots then chop it into bits and dissolve it in nitric acid, creating a deadly radioactive sludge to be stored elsewhere on site.
This is the control room for BROKK 90 - a robotic demolition machine that is being used to dismantle and dispose of an old nuclear research laboratory. Constructed in the 1950s, the building is currently unsafe for humans to enter, so BROKK is operated from a nearby location.
Once the demolition job is complete, a separate operator uses a RAPTOR robot arm to sort and store the materials. The master-slave robot arm copies the movements of its human operators to load waste into hundreds of 500-litre plastic drums. These drums can be safely crushed to form small "pucks", to be stored on site.
The decommissioning of the reactor was safely completed in May 2011, significantly reducing the hazard associated with the iconic "golf ball" structure.
Sellafield also has its own train station, fire service and police force - the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. Until September 11, 2001, its visitor centre was a major tourist attraction, visited by an average of 1,000 people daily. On arrival, WIRED's photographer was met by armed police intrigued by his presence.
The radioactive rubble (tubing, graphite bricks, metalwork etc) is loaded into lorry-sized reinforced concrete boxes. Each can contain around 100 sieverts of radiation (five or six sieverts is deadly). Before leaving this strictly-no-humans zone, the boxes are sealed with a steel and concrete grout.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
