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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/15/dismantling-sellafield-epic-task-shutting-down-decomissioned-nuclear-site>
"If you take the cosmic view of Sellafield, the superannuated nuclear facility
in north-west England, its story began long before the Earth took shape. About
9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon
themselves, and then exploded. The sheer force of these supernova detonations
mashed together the matter in the stars’ cores, turning lighter elements like
iron into heavier ones like uranium. Flung out by such explosions, trillions of
tonnes of uranium traversed the cold universe and wound up near our slowly
materialising solar system.
And here, over roughly 20m years, the uranium and other bits of space dust and
debris cohered to form our planet in such a way that the violent tectonics of
the young Earth pushed the uranium not towards its hot core but up into the
folds of its crust. Within reach, so to speak, of the humans who eventually
came along circa 300,000BC, and who mined the uranium beginning in the 1500s,
learned about its radioactivity in 1896 and started feeding it into their
nuclear reactors 70-odd years ago, making electricity that could be relayed to
their houses to run toasters and light up Christmas trees.
Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is
a place where multiple time spans – some fleeting, some cosmic – drift in and
out of view. Laid out over six square kilometres, Sellafield is like a small
town, with nearly a thousand buildings, its own roads and even a rail siding –
all owned by the government, and requiring security clearance to visit.
Sellafield’s presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost
hallucinatory. One moment you’re passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the
sea winking just beyond. Then, having driven through a high-security gate,
you’re surrounded by towering chimneys, pipework, chugging cooling plants,
everything dressed in steampunk. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. In some
spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. It feels like the most
manmade place in the world.
Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. First it
manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. Then it generated electricity for
the National Grid, until 2003. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing:
extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after they’d ended
their life cycles. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the
reprocessing came to an end as well. It was a historic occasion. From an
operational nuclear facility, Sellafield turned into a full-time storage depot
– but an uncanny, precarious one, filled with toxic nuclear waste that has to
be kept contained at any cost."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
