Sellafield: the most hazardous place in Europe

Sellafield: the most hazardous place in Europe

The Guardian 21 April 09 Last week the government announced plans for a new generation of nuclear plants. But Britain is still dealing with the legacy of its first atomic installation at Sellafield – a toxic waste dump in one of the most contaminated buildings in Europe. As a multi-billion-pound clean-up is planned, can we avoid making the same mistakes again?

………………………… “It is the most hazardous industrial building in western Europe,” according to George Beveridge, Sellafield’s deputy managing director.

Nor is it hard to understand why the building possesses such a fearsome reputation. Piles of old nuclear reactor parts and decaying fuel rods, much of them of unknown provenance and age, line the murky, radioactive waters of the cooling pond in the centre of B30. Down there, pieces of contaminated metal have dissolved into sludge that emits heavy and potentially lethal doses of radiation.

It is an unsettling place, though B30 is certainly not unique. There is Building B38 next door, for example. “That’s the second most hazardous industrial building in Europe,” said Beveridge. Here highly radioactive cladding from reactor fuel rods is stored, also under water. And again, engineers have only a vague idea what else has been dumped in its cooling pond and left to disintegrate for the past few decades.

………………….. This, then, is the dark heart of Sellafield, a place where engineers and scientists are only now confronting the legacy of Britain’s postwar atomic aspirations and the toxic wasteland that has been created on the Cumbrian coast. Engineers estimate that it could cost the nation up to £50bn to clean this up over the next 100 years………

……… the condition of edifices such as B30 and B38 – and all the other “legacy” structures built at Sellafield decades ago – suggest Britain might end up paying a heavy price for this new commitment to nuclear energy. After all, if it is going to cost that much to decommission early reactors, green groups and opponents of nuclear energy are asking, what might we end up paying for a second clean-up if we go ahead with new nuclear plants?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/19/sellafield-nuclear-plant-cumbria-hazards

April 21, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, wastes | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, radioactive