Simon Reeves visits Sellafield - reuploaded
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- čas přidán 15. 05. 2022
- Neptune Network does not own this video. This video was uploaded 28. november 2021 by BBC 2 and removed from the platform in january 2022. This video is meant for criticism and educational purposed and goes under Fair Use.
Love the “shut Sellafield” tag line on this video, like you could just close the gate and walk away in a weekend! Sellafield will still be there in some form or another in a hundred years time at least.
I have driven past this place numerous times ... first time it put a chill up my spine ... How Glad i am i didnt get a road construction job from the north side to the digging a foundation 20m plus deep .... those ventilation chimneys had almost unbeleaveable diamensions ...
Cumberland is such a Beautiful Region but this Legacy certainly tarnishes that ... But we just have to Clean up the Mess we made .... its not a nice mess foresure . However theres Places in the world that are worse off because of similar or worse accidents in the Field of Neuclear Physics ...
‘Some think that nuclear is the solution to climate change, even though wind and solar are a fraction of the price.’
1. Fraction of the price, smaller fraction of the energy efficiency.
2. The elements required for solar energy are rarer and more harmfully extracted from the earth in expressions of the effect on labour forces and the environments they’re extracted from.
3. The carbon emitted in making photovoltaics, tidal and wind generators is hardly an improvement. The scale by which you would need to extract elements for making photovoltaics and wind turbines to compete with nuclear energy would be a disaster for the campaign to promote solar and wind as carbon ‘neutral’ energy sources.
People need to just accept that all of our energy demands involve scary and unpleasant factors. If we could store nuclear waste underground in areas where we already have armed security (think of the military bases up and down the country), and use the accumulated knowledge for improved nuclear waste handling and disposal then we have removed the lingering ghost of nuclear power.
Anybody arguing that Chernobyl could happen needs to chill and check reality. As long as we keep nuclear facilities secure and employ informed and reliable people to run them we could cut the cost of powering a nation of millions by factors that we couldn’t comprehend.
The reason we couldn’t comprehend how much cheaper it could be is because the energy industry is run by manipulative tyrants who have maintained greater empires than the East India Company.
The reporter seems to have no prior knowledge and averything is a sensation. The fact is that due to lack of planning, cost-cutting and poor management the current situation has been developing for decades. Only recently has effective care been taken to clean-up this awful mess. Those working at Sellefield these days are heroes. Not becauseof radiation, because the risks are mitigated, but the skill, innovation and excellence devoted to the clean-up. But there are no secrets any more. And yes, cameras have been into that building many times.
Well, the early British nuclear project was a very haphazard affair. It was a bit fumbled.
Think of the filters on the stacks that nearly never existed. It's a miracle there has never been a more serious incident.
The reactor fire. Air cooled reactor, and it took them a fair old while to contemplate turning the fans off and then try extinguishing the fire with water.
Remember when we tried to fool the Americans that we had developed thermonuclear weapons, when really they were just boosted with tritium?
I'm not going to blame the pioneers who worked on this stuff of course they made mistakes ...public opinion went against "nuclear" including against nuclear energy and with that went funding to deal with problems and here are some of the consequences of those cuts. " wind and solar are a fraction of the price " people keep saying this A) the price of something that isn't there when you need is irrelevant ( if the wind isn't blowing), there is no energy storage scalable to cope with wind or solar or tidal dominated generation. ( give it 30 year maybe... is that good enough) B) Nuclear energy costs reduce with scale like nothing else and we need it on a massive scale so the costs will fall dramatically if we manage things competently. We've got to start reprocessing and fast reactor programmes again so waste like this is reprocessed and "burnt" in fast reactors which generate 10 -30( I think??) times as much energy from the "waste" than the thermal reactor did making it leaving behind much less material that's safe in circa 300 years decay. Do your research the information is out there. Existing nuclear energy technology is the only base load clean ( very low carbon) source we can scale to provide for our needs. Also other nuclear fission energy technologies ( fast reactors , molten salt, variety of SMR) have more potential than any other generation technologies. It's literally the most powerfull technology known to man for good or evil and if you mismanage it things can go wrong, that happens with powerful technology but to suggest we don't use our most powerful technology to tackle our biggest ever challenge is wrong IMO.
.. 'to provide for our needs' .. I suggest we seriously assess just what these are/might/should be ..
@johnwakefield8570 yes that's got to be part of it. But poorer countries look at our quality of life and want the energy generating technology necessary to support that quality of life ( even with savings). Are we going to say no you can't have it you should have intermitant energy sources only because our media likes those technologies. They want use their fossil fuels the way we do/ and did. Will we say you can't use nuclear to provide a clean base load. They are going to get more power whether we like it or not and can you blame them. Right now the only option they have for reliable power is fossil fuels. Nuclear tech is the only thing that can replace that ( in most situations)
Only £100bn!? The government just cost us that in one week with 'trickle down' economics.
We all went on a school trip north to Sellafield from our hometown of Barrow in 1989 iirc,after the Tour of the site ended, we all got a badge with "I've been to Sellafield" wrote on it.....Some clever wit among my friends wrote "and survived" in black biro on the bottom of the badge....so we all did the same to our own,lols....that caused much mirth among us and much rage amongst our teachers on the Coach?another notable memory of the trip is the tour guide calling the Chimneys "Chimleys"....That to caused a huge uproar of uncontrollable laughter as you could well imagine!🙉😉Great late 1980s days of yore!😁👌....btw thanks for the Memories/Flashbacks mate!🇬🇧☢️🤩😉😎👍
It would be nice if the cleanup and redevelopment could include some gen 4 reactors such as fast spectrum waste burners which can use spent fuel to produce more than 40 times more energy
To say that the site is related to Nuclear Power is a bit misleading. This is mostly a site for manufacturing nuclear material for weapon use.
Power was more like an added benefit but it wasn’t the main purpose for this site.
It had a nuclear reactor on site called Calder Hall
@@christeamhound Which was mainly used to produce plutonium for the nuclear weapons program…
Electricity generation was mainly for the public peace of mind.
@tonamg53 As someone who’s worked there for most of my life I can tell you, you are wrong. Windscale pile1 and 2 were built to produce weapons grade plute. The 4 reactors at Calder Hall were built to produce electricity. Despite what Wikipedia says Calder Hall and Hinckley point were built with the ABILITY to produce ploute in an emergency (ie war) they never actually did, or at least not much. Polaris entered service in 68 and since then the U.K. has been entirely reliant on the U.S. for nukes. Calder Hall meanwhile didn’t stop producing electricity until 2003, 35 years after Britain stopped producing nukes. In fact between Calder opening and Polaris entertaining service was just 12 years.
@@colinreid165 Windscale piles were shutdown permanently after the 1957 fire…
Where else do you think UK got its supply of plutonium from?
From International Panel on Fissile Material:
“The main production site for UK military plutonium was the Sellafield complex, which hosted a total of six production reactors: the two Windscale Piles and *the four Calder Hall reactors* and all reprocessing operations.”
From the Institute of Civil Engineering:
“Calder Hall was in fact *primarily intended to produce plutonium* for the UK’s atomic weapons programme. *Producing electricity for the domestic market was a sideline* for the plant”
Are you like receiving your salary from the UK government or something to spread misinformation?
@@colinreid165 Also note the Trident missile is American but the war head for British Trident missiles are primarily constructed at AWE Aldermaston.
👍🏻
This video is quite misleading, as with many discussions about Sellafield, it falsely depicts the troubled site as a product of Nuclear Energy generation. Rather, the site started out as Windscale, where it was used exclusively for the production of nuclear material for nuclear weapons. The site was then morphed into the Magnox program, reactors that were designed primarily to produce large amounts of irradiated fuel that would have the plutonium recovered at Sellafield.
It is wrong to say that Sellafield, in all its horrors, is a product of Nuclear Energy, like some campaign groups are doing.
Modern nuclear energy produces very minimal waste and what it does produce can be recycled without the mess you see at Sellafield.
Nuclear Energy WILL be needed to achieve affordable and clean electricity, wind & solar fail to do any heavy lifting.
BULLSHITS!
Nuclear energy _can_ be safe and we’ll likely need it to avert a climate disaster, but in the wrong hands (e.g. profit-driven corporations or authoritarian governments) it’s always a substantial risk. Yes, it was the haste for nuclear weapons that produced most of this mess, but nuclear power programs have also made a significant contribution. Reactor designs which are passively safe, combined with intense oversight and strict governance of nuclear facilities, could achieve an acceptably low hazard profile and bring enormous benefit.
Recycling and waste management should be incorporated into the design. Many facilities seems to have no idea about what to do with the waste. Fukushima, i think stored used fuel on top of the reactors. Which is just mind boggling, considering the emergency diesels were in the basement, and the reactors exploded. That design is not from the 50s. And the japanese are so smart, how could they not have seen this ?
About waste, i think we need to add uranium mining, and plants for milling, refining, and converting uranium, and fuel fabrication plants is also part of the nuclear power process. This adds much more waste.
Only in New Mexico is 1100 abandoned mines with mountains of radioactive tailings, and it has polluted groundwater on Navaho Nation with 524 mines there. Powering a one-gigawatt nuclear plant for a year can require mining 20,000-400,000 mt of ore, processing it into 27.6 mt of uranium fuel, and disposing of 27.6 mt of highly radioactive spent fuel, of which 90% (by volume) is low-level waste, 7% is intermediate-level waste, and 3% is high-level waste. The world’s inventory of uranium mill tailings amounts to 2,352.55 million tonnes as of 2011. These tailings leak radon gas and radioactivity into the surrounding area, even if they are buried and covered with a thin layer of grass, to make them look pretty.
Also, any recycling facility that is constructed/built to handle used fuel,
will produce more waste, since that facility also will become contaminated.
The finnish Olkiluoto power plant is the best example i can come up with, that seems to have at least some good design choices:
1. Its big. Build everything in 1 place, to keep it contained. Very good choice.
2. It has a storage facility called Onkalo. 500 meter deep into granite, it will accept used fuel for 100 years. Also super positive.
3. The waste Heat is used.
4. Its based on well known principles and design. No breeder reactors or molten salt stuff. So no surprises.
About the British technology: There is significant evidence that the British Magnox nuclear plant design - which was primarily built as a military plutonium production factory - provided the blueprint for the North Korean military plutonium programme based in Yongbyon.
Magnox was primarily for power generation, all sites being initially built for the CEGB with the exception of Calder Hall and Chapelcross (which were never owned by CEGB or their successors but always by BNFL). However the reprocessing plants (both Magnox and THORP) were in the main for the nuclear power industry. It was also the location of the first experimental AGR reactor. So while its initial focus was indeed Pu production for weapons, the dirtiest sites (with the expection of Windscale 1) are the reprocessing sites and their associated ponds.
You're not wrong, except for that bit about recycling nuclear waste. If that is do be done in a responsible way such as to not wind up like Sellafield it will be ungodly expensive.
I don't know if I can be bothered to watch this film, well seeing he's not an engineer or technical man, errors already at 00:37 and someone should have told him that as a reporter, writer or journalist to be more correct with your choice of words, fire DID NOT sweep thro Windscale, more accurately a specific single reactor pile overheated which led to a runaway thermal increase which by a 'last chance saloon' idea of wetting/ cooling the surrounding pile and working inwards (my description and I've never seen it better put) ... by luck and bloody dangerous hard work they managed to decrease temperature toward safety again. The meanwhile ensuing air ventilation was an admitted calamity (and a fundamental basic design flaw) ... thank God for the Cockcroft filters at the top of the stack and Tom Tuohy and no doubt others that did the necessary. Heroes one and all! No doubt I'll add to this as I get past 00:37
The Cockcroft filters were ineffective. Had they been effective, visible smoke would not have been seen pouring from them. And there is no question that the pile was on fire, not merely overheated. See Lora Arnold (UKAEA's historian) _Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident_
While we can see the issues with Sellafield and the decommissioning. Earlier the waste was stored it was dumped into the North Sea. It was placed in lead lined drums and covered in concrete. There was an old 1970 interview with a politician explaining the containers and the dumping process. An interviewer asked the immortal question.... how long do the containers last? The politician said 25 years. The obvious next question was... then what??? That question wasn’t answered.
So next time you are at a local beach on that coast, now you know why the water quality chart shows radioactivity readings. Also why my family left Barrow and now live in New Zealand. Still miss the Lake District though.
From my view, it shows a previously cash strapped site, with multiple problems but also a site that is dealing with the problem, day by day and achieving real results. The warehouse at the end with the cut up nuclear reactor parts is the way forward. We need nuclear if we are to go down the "net zero" route.
Well, it also shows that no thought was given to the storage of radioactive waste. And whilst it might be looked at today, we still have no provision for how high level radioactive waste will be dealt with.
@@CA_I Yes we do. They're called Concrete Sarcophagus'.
@@CA_I its called the Concrete Sarcophagus which goes down for mile and miles underground
@@CA_I What are you talking about? No thought? If they didn't give it any thought they would have just dumped it. Instead they build a facility to store the wast. Yes they should have given it more thought and people are have to deal with it now, but to say that they didn't give it any thought it just ridiculous. They could have just dumped it somewhere but they didn't.
BULLSHITS!
I cant stop thinking about putting reactors on big ships and mooring them around the coast to provide power. We can use the proven reactor technology from submarines, they could be kept away from population centers. Modular and flexible, AND could be funded through central government with no planning kerfuffle no NIMBYism or prolonged construction difficulties. MASSIVE opportunity, could build and lease these offshore power stations to other countries. Could easily move the spent fuel around to an appropriate decommissioning point. This would be a big capital investment... but could be a big decatbonising positive and potentially a revenue stream.
Good plan; although need to be tethered down and put in sheltered harbours; plus secure from possible looney tune attacks; same applies to mini and mobile reactors being developed.
That is one seriously hardened ROV.
I can see why even the BBC took this video down. It's garbage beginning to end.
I was living and playing music in Scotland .. they used to have the workers take a shower to 'clean it off' .. would imagine a number of them died .. en route ..
@1:58 bullshit!! you can wear that type of passive dosimeter anywhere you like as long as it is visible. You would not tuck it underneath another layer of clothing. As a visitor Simon (and all members of his film crew) would have been issued with an active dosimeter which would give a live measurement of his exposure! As for how he talked about the risks from the different "zones" give me strength!. The different zones are all about the level of training and protection someone has to minimise their exposure. Simon has no training so his guides have to take maximum care of him. With the right level of training and protection those working in the most radioactive areas of a site could actually be exposed to less radiation than those working in areas with the least radioactive exposure.
5:01 The statement is untrue, camera crews have been inside that building (B30), like here back in 1989 when B30 was still operational: czcams.com/video/A6mpz7FcCTU/video.htmlfeature=shared&t=2206
Why is it reversed left-right? Why is the sound so muffled? The original is perfect.
To avoid copyright hits.
The comment about not knowing the effects of radiation when Winscale was built is just not true. The first nuclear pile CP1 was built in Chicago in 1942, and there was an accident durig construction that killed someone due to a fatal dose of radiation, and of course there were the 2 bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WW2. The after effects of those bombs on the human victims were heavily researched and documented in great detail. So the dangers of radiation were very well known, although DNA hadn't been discovered then so there was no awareness of this being the real insidious factor of radiation on the human body. Also, looking at nuclear material handling in Winscale, which was incorporated in the design of the plant, indicated they were fully aware of the danger of radiation. So the subsequent negligence in the operation of the plant is deplorable verging on criminal.
Worked there a few times cooling ponds leak like sivs DEADLY !!!!
When you have that much money you can change history & the name of a place associated with greed & problems. Short cuts will always happen. Greed is human nature and history had proven what happens next
Why is the video laterally inverted?
to avoid copyright issues from the owner.
I'll bet that any assistance from the Gov is dwindling
Decommissioning of legacy facilities, some of which date back to the UK's first efforts to produce an atomic bomb, is planned for completion by 2120 at a cost of £121 billion. (wikipedia) comes from the gov. to the NDA to Sellafield
Theyre trying to, but they got alot of house keeping to do first.
How is possible that Nobody forecast the failure
Of the nuclear program….
Il be never clean
Despite billions
It will be clean some day, every year we learn more about reprocessing nuclear material, what was considered spent fuel or waste in the 1970's can now fuel the latest reactors.
Is he diferent or is his heart realy on the wrong side? It must be the Film crew everthing is back to frond he was driving on the wrong side of the road, the notices were back to front, or is that the way they do things in the NORTH? worring to say the least.
I thought reprocessing was still happening at Sellafield?
As I understand it, the last reprocessing facility was MAGNOX. And wikipedia says, that MAGNOX ceased reprocessing in July 2022. There is a brand-new and highly recommendable documentary on the Sellafield YT channel about the end of the MAGNOX reprocessing plant.
Yes, It must be my imagination when I see regular flask trains going North from Bridgwater (Hinckley Point) ☢️
@@TrainDriverRob the fuel is still transported to sellafield from the power stations. It is now stored but not reprocessed.
Reporters like this shouldnt go to places they dont understand .
NOPE not any longer
Some right old junk has been dumped there, like in the ponds.
Like a lot of TV, I would prefer it without the music.
Some good recession proof jobs there
This has so many cliché out of context, bs sensationalist statements in the first 45 seconds I'm not sure it's worth watching.
Well it appears that thier is good jobs for the English people. Wind and solar run on natural gas to make up for the clouds and lack of wind. So maybe that's why it's so much cheaper. 🤔
When talking about power generation you didn’t mention the need for base load only relative cost- all a bit too sensationalist
Nuclear insanity
I miss Jamiroquai too.
Never should've moved away from coal.