Radioactive Welsh Lake - Legacy of Trawsfynydd
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ต.ค. 2024
- The Trawsfynydd nuclear power station is the UK's only inland nuclear reactor, and resides beside Wales' second largest lake, Llyn Trawsfynydd. The site has a fascinating history and remains a centre of activity and pioneering practices in nuclear decomissioning. The site has been responsible for significant radioactive contamination, employment, power and may have a future role in more modern nuclear technologies. My documentary focuses on these issues as well as the issues that face local people in terms of their health, work, leisure and indeed their future.
Filmed using Gx85 Lumix and DJI Mini 3
Credits to Jed Naylor - Fisherman and assistant camera operator
Music credits:
"Sky On Fire" by Cold Cinema
bit.ly/3QOxF0B
"Stalker" by Cold Cinema
bit.ly/3VxvsYe
Anticipation - FesliyanStudios
Trouble is Brewing - FesliyanStudios
'Light in Dark Places' by Scott Buckley
Still old photos - Mirrorpix archive
Disclaimer - I will admit this video is quite dramatic. It is likely that any risk to visitors is negligible, though the long term effect of frequent and prolonged exposure to the site may have some risks. These risks need to be evaluated with further good quality study and cannot be accurately estimated at this time. I encourage you to research yourself.
![เปิดใจ "อาจารย์เบียร์ คนตื่นธรรม" อดีตเคยสุดทุกทาง ถ้าใช้หนี้หมดไปบวชแน่ l [Nickynachat]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/IxeE0xVhy08/mqdefault.jpg)
I apologise for my poor pronunciation of some of the Welsh locations in this, I did not intent to cause any offence. I will endeavour to improve on this point in the future.
I know most English people can't pronounce Welsh words, even though Welsh and it's related languages are the native languages of Britain, not English. If you want to learn about your British heritage, then you should learn something about the native languages. Normally I just laugh at the attempts, but this has to be the worst video I have ever encountered for pronunciation of Welsh! A few points to note:
"Llyn" is the word for "Lake", saying "Lake Trawsfynydd Lake" sounds stupid.
"Ll" is a single letter, there is no 'L' in Llyn, you need to at least attempt not to pronounce it with an 'L'.
"dd" is also a single letter, there is no 'd' in Trawsfynydd, again, make an attempt at the correct letter.
The name "Snowdonia" has been obsoleted, everyone is is now supposed to call it "Eryri" - another challenge for you!
"Afon" starts with an "Ahh", not an "Aye".
"Prysor", the 'y' is not an English 'Y", more an "Ugh".
"Maentrog" - starts with "Mine"
We don't expect you to get it right, but if you are going to pronounce the words/names, at least make an attempt to get close, it is not hard to look up the pronunciation online.
You should also have mentioned that the most serious nuclear pollution in that area, which prevented many local farms from selling their produce for decades, was not from the Trawsfynydd power plant, but from Chernobyl. Trawsfynydd itself has released far less radioactive pollution than any coal fired power plant of its era. "The fact that coal power plants are radioactive has been established not only on the basis of scientific data, but also because some companies have specialised in salvaging uranium from the smoke the plants give off in order to resell it to the nuclear power industry". The fact that it is taking a long time to decommission is a feature, not a problem; most of the time there is very little happening, other than waiting for the radioactive elements to decay naturally and become safe.
Give the facts, and the problems, but keep them in context. That power station saved the release of a billion tonnes of CO2, lots of radiation, significant quantities of arsenic, lead, thallium, mercury, uranium and thorium into the atmosphere from coal power.
P.S. Try to get the Welsh spellings correct too. Your description contains "Lynn Trawsfynydd." - spelt as you say it, not correctly spelt!
No problem, buddy.
For a close pronunciation use the following,
Traws (say ‘trousers’ without the ers. So ‘trous’)
fyn (say ‘fun’)
ydd (say ‘with’ without the w. So ‘ith’)
Great video. 👍
@@nigels.6051 excellent and great to hear someone debunk the myths about nuclear power pollution versus coal fired power generation! 👏
I am much more concerned about your sources here. I have not seen anything to suggest contamination is any worse than any other nuclear plants of the era.
not sure how the lake can become contaminated, the MAGNOX reactors were core-cooled by pressurised Carbon Dioxide, which was cooled by the steam circuit, which in turn was cooled by the lake water. The lake water did not come into contact with the core of the reactors.
Half baked green pseudo science masquerading as information but carefully avoiding giving details of magnitudes. Exaggeration running riot as expected.
Apparently there were leaks from the cooling ponds due to joint weakness in their structure during its operational phase and some low level contamination during the refuelling and decommissioning phase but in line with authorised discharges.
The caesium 137 has been found in the lakes sediment at levels considered to be trivial but that doesn’t make a good TH-cam title does it! In actual fact it’s so radio active it was decided that a trout farm with fish pens would be a great Idea to introduce into the food chain!
Correct.
When I was doing A-level physics, I took some water samples from the lake. At school I placed a geiger tube over them and compared counts between the lake water, mineral water from a shop, local tap water, rain water (100 km from the lake) etc. There was no significant difference among them. I also dried out the dissolved solids and tested those. Again, no significant difference. The video notes that any contaminants are now in the lake sediments, and my testing and sampling was crude. At least, I was able to satisfy myself that the lake wasn't conspicuously radioactive compared with background.
The Carbon Dioxide is not normally vented into the atmosphere, except when depressurising for maintenance (2-yearly) although minor (repeat- minor) losses do occur during operation. This gas has negligible radioactivity, unless a fuel element leaks, But that is identified and removed from the reactor quite quickly. Routine monitoring of the environment is carried out by the Health Physics teams.
The lake water is pumped through the turbine condensers and forms no part of the nuclear circuit. It would be used in the same quantities if the the power station had been coal fired for the same output. There are some discharges of liquid low-level radioactive waste into the water, but these are all closely monitored and have to conform to strict limits.
Given a choice of living near a nuclear station or a coal/oil fired station, The healthiest option is nuclear- no acid rain or dust.
The types of reactors that have been used for electricity in the UK have never taken water straight from outside the station. The gas reactors had three circuits, the primary gas loop which cooled the reactor, the secondary which is a water circuit going to the steam turbines, and finally the condenser circuit which draws water from the lake and into the turbine condenser to cool the secondary loop's water which cools the reactor's gas / water.
You are highly incorrect at 1:50, the Magnox reactors DID NOT VENT to atmosphere under normal operations, as mentioned above it stays in the primary circuit with insignificant particles of it being lost, same as any other boiler in many different industries.
6:36 Source?
7:16 Every sunny day you go outside you are exposed to radiation from the sun, every second of your life, radiation. You need to specify what sort of radiation. Reactors like the BWR and PWR every once in a while dump small amounts of treated triturated water to the environment, very small controlled releases that they would be diluted in a short time and pose very little to no risk.
Also along with your statement of "liquid nuclear waste" what type of nuclear waste are you talking about? as in most countries there are three classes of nuclear waste, Low Level, which is things like potentially radioactive materials, such as broken tools that may have come into contact with radioactive materials at a nuclear site. Intermediate level wastes which are quite radioactive, in this case that would be the Graphite blocks. And finally high level wastes which include things like the reactor's fuel. Around 97% of nuclear waste is actually the low level waste, of which poses little risk when compared to the high level wastes.
7:40, the USSR was known for not giving a single hoot about nuclear safety, as long as it was safe enough not to have the majority complain about it, it was allowed. In the UK, vents and water dumping is done in a controlled manner, excluding the accidental leaks at the Swarf Silos and Dounreay. The deliberate releases in the UK have been done with heavy moderation and adherence to the regulations of of the time when the releases happened, of which means the risks have been analysed so little harm to the public is ensured.
And even then, given that say Tritium has a half life of about twenty years, by now after the first release you claimed, after the first half life the majority of the radioactivity it gives off would have decayed and it will keep getting safer every twenty years until it becomes a stable isotope again.
I would also like the mention that the UK has only had one major incident with nuclear that had a significant affect on the locals, and that was The Windscale Fire, and the whole conception of Windscale came about after the USA backstabbed the allies and kept the nuclear weapons to themselves, so UK nuclear scientists needed to rush to make nuclear weapons.
If I have made a mistake please make sure to leave a correction in the reply.
During operations at Trawsfynydd the bioshield voids were routinely ventilated leading to aerial discharges of radioactive material. Similarly radioactive reactor coolant gas was vented periodically. _Source: Magnox Ltd_
Magnox reactors were designed to permit what was considered a minimal amount of radiation to escape in their cooling water. The designers recognised it was impossible to prevent any discharge so they set about keeping it as a safe as was reasonable.
Hi pal, I’ll grant the video isn’t perfect. I will try my best in the future as always to be accurate, but there’s also a creative element to this. I’m not a journalist, just trying to make interesting videos. I’m not telling anyone to move house over this. Still I value the feedback and thank you for it
Some beautiful photography, but oh dear, the narrative is typical anti-nuclear sensationalism full of ‘if’s, ‘concerns’, ‘possible’s, ‘risk’s etc etc. You’re happy to cite a study that claimed that cancer rates were 15x higher downwind of the site and then have to grudgingly admit that the study was flawed and based on anecdotal evidence.
I lived the first 30 odd years of my life at Trawsfynydd, much of that time was spent on and around the shores of the lake, fishing for trout with my dad. The trout we caught would be taken home and eaten without any qualms.
My father worked at the Health Physics lab situated about a mile from the station where they had a regular testing regime of samples of fish netted from the lake, lake and rain water, lake mud deposits, milk from local farms, moss and vegetation, and airborne dust. Their methods were sensitive enough to detect that an atmospheric nuclear bomb test had been conducted at a time when the nuclear superpowers had agreed not to conduct such testing - China later admitted that it had been one of theirs.
You could also have usefully mentioned the massive positive impact that the station had on the local community. In an area desperately short of work since the demise of the slate industry, the station provided some 800 relatively well paid jobs, now sorely missed.
@user-cz6fh8fq2xA Road y’say? ? Eee, Bloody luxury
Ummm, Sir Basil Spence can surely not be credited with 'developing the design' of a nuclear power station. He was the architect also responsible for Coventry Cathedral.
@@philhealey4443 Shush, or he'll make a video about how the cathedral's radioactive too! :dramatic music:
Hi Jay, Firstly kudos on your fabulous video. I am in Australia and had no idea that Wales had it's own Nuclear plants.
Your stunning videography is unmatched. I've added your video to my curated list of all things "Atomic Nuclear" so others may enjoy it as much as I did.
5 STARS!
Extremely good video. I used to drive past Trawsfynydd very regularly on my way to Harlech. That area always had a mystique about it after Chernobyl disaster in the 90s.
Wow. My sister and I swam in that lake regularly during the early 80's on camping trips. All good healthwise! It's a special place to me.
Lovely video footage but the Trawsfynydd Magnox Station was not the UK's only inland nuclear reactor.
I think it was the only one that used a lake as its environmental heat sink.
Aside of all the research reactors around the UK, the BNFL Magnox Station at Chapelcross in Scotland was another example of an inland Magnox Station.
But like its sister station at Calder Hall, it used cooling towers.
"Working head of water being around 630ft" - this had me a bit confused, with the lake having a depth of 4 meters on average. The 630ft refers to the height of the water relative to the Maentrog Hydro-Electric power station, which is down almost at sea level on the Dwyryd Esturary. This power station, opened in 1928, is still operating, the only power station now operated by Magnox! It produces 30MW, around 60 GWh of electricity annually, enough for 12,000 homes.
I thought it was a nice touch that Sir Basil Spence designed the buildings. Definately pro nuclear here. I do believe it was too important to be left to privatised electricity companies though. As a result we have an ageing reactor fleet and are having to use foreign technology now.
great documentary and very well made , Britain's nuclear history is fascinating and would love to see more - keep up the great work !
I know the area well, half my family come from Harlech and surrounds. No babies with three heads, no mutants, no talking tumours, no horror stories at all. I'd wager more people, and definitely birds, are killed on wind farms around wales each year than have been killed by the Trawsfynydd plant, ever.
All very true, as you say.
You might want to check your pronunciation of place names to avoid insulting the Locals. It suggests a lazy Englishman who could not be bothered to do some basic checks and just undermines your video "message".
Appologies that it came across this way. I did my best but in the future I’ll try to get the pronunciation better!
@@tjrr1999 If people are offended by someone, from outside the area's pronounciation, it really is their problem. The content of your well presented vid is far more important than what such people will forever moan about. I live in the area and am not Welsh, so I can translate for you
Brian Lopez.... local boy is it?
We have been working around the hydro station for many years. The hydro station was built in 1928. And is still operating. Some people seem to think the reservoir was built for the nuclear station🙄
There are many errors in this piece. My apologies for pointing this out, but you could correct them if you feel it will be useful.
Hinkley C is 1.6GW per reactor, not 3.2.
The later AGR's have no containment either and certainly do not have a concrete one. Only Sizewell B does and this is an American PWR design.
What is the does rate of all the radioactivity events you speak of? You cannot say much about it until you have these numbers. It will only be useful for propaganda.
I have several geiger counters, one is a spectrum analyser. If you want to join me we can do a site survey and get some real numbers to tell people about. We can also compare these numbers relative to background radiation
What do you say?
Hi Robin,
Appreciate you taking the time to comment. Certainly, if I’m in the area again I would love to do some testing, I’m sure it’d make a very fun video!
Oh and just to add, it’s not propaganda, I’m not attempting to influence political views or actions. I won’t deny I’m fallible and errors were made, the video’s not perfect but it was just for fun and interest. I’m not paid by the oil companies as some other commenters have suggested haha
@@tjrr1999 Sorry, but claiming that your inaccurate information and menacing music is just "fun" doesn't cut it. If you accept that the video is inaccurate, take it down.
Thanks for this, but it would be useful to know which radioisotopes are involved, what are their halflives and do they get bioaccumulated.?
Your video is factually incorrect, it is quite clear you have no technical knowledge of Trawsfynydd NPS and later Magnox sites, may I suggest less drama and more fact.
Love to see these industrial castles in detail
There were fields along the shores of lake Bala that have been too radioactive for grazing animals. This was found after the Chernobyl disaster and blamed on that. The locals know that it was from Trawsfynydd. These fields were only signed off a few years ago.
Fallout from Chernobyl did contaminate much of the UK, particularly affecting hill farms. Not much was made about that by the mainstream Media.
Very interesting, my father worked at the power plant in the late 60's, I have no real memory of the place as I was only 4 years old at the time. So thanks for some background and great footage.
Thanks for sharing
I remember a University challenge question about the voiced dental fricative, known to English speakers as the as the th sound in father, it's pretty rare except in English and Welsh. The welsh alphabet has a 'd' and a 'dd' - 'd' is as you would expect (the 'd' in 'dad'), 'dd' is the 'th' in father
Not really a "th" sound, the tongue should be in a different place, and it is not really a 'dd'; that is only used because the old printing presses didn't have enough of the correct letter 'ð'. Now we have computers capable of all characters, we should be using ð in type as well as handwritten script, then people would understand that they were pronouncing it wrong!
Gave up after a minute. The overly dramatic music just says "no credibility."
I got 7 minutes in, but that was mainly allowing the nonsense to play out while reading the comments. I don't think this guy's going to take any constructive criticism though, too much ego.
Informative, I have been and taken photos but didn't realise some of the impact of the design. I live reasonably close to Hinkley in Somerset the site is immense the impact already on its surroundings but then we do all use power which has to come from renewables or nuclear. When will they realise the power of hydro in the Bristol Channel
I got a rhetorical question , do people still fish in the lake ? Yes they do ! There’s no health warning on eating trout from the lake
Those drone shots are spectacular. Wales has some truly magnificent natural beauty, seen even better from the air.
I've seen these buildings they are imposing and kind of scary looking, sobering to think they will have to survive into the 2080s when they were designed to last maybe 1/3 of that...
I have questions about the radiation - If the lake is indeed contaminated and this has been tested and confirmed, then why are there no warnings and people still swimming in the lake, fishing, eating the fish etc? Nuclear leaks do indeed happen (take the Sellafield incident for example) but one would expect a response to mitigate the risks to the population which appear to be totally lacking here. So either it's not radioactive or there's been a huge coverup.... Which is it?
One of the hill farmers said when they got paid out for the so called fallout from Chernobyl that the radiation was from Trawsfynydd not Chernobyl.
I went past it some years ago there were monitors up on the telegraph poles in the past monitoring the area. That got the attention of the locals I was told.
A bit of work needed on the Welsh pronunciations methinks.
Llyn Trawsfynydd or “Lin trawsfinid” should sound more like ‘Clin Trousefunuth’…this in itself is an abysmal example, but it’s much closer.
It's kind of cool to me that Welsh is probably quite similar to the language of the iron age Britons. It's a very ancient lingo. Less than 10 words remain of that ancient language in modern English.
Modern English is a hybrid mixture of languages brought to Britain by the various invaders and conquerors. Latin from the Romans. Germanic from the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who eventually formed Angleland, i.e., England. Norse from the Danes/Vikings who ruled England under King Cnut the Great and King Sven Forkbeard. French from the Normans after William the Bastard showed up in 1066ad.
That makes me think that the Welsh are far more British than the English. Hehe. (I am biased, because my grandma was Welsh and my other grandma was Scots -- the rest is Italian, Irish. and English - UK raised, but NZ born).
Thank you for the feedback, I’ll be sure to try and approximate to the correct pronunciation better in the future
@A_S_M_R "Clin Trousefunuth’" - ahh, no, don't put a 'C' at the beginning! That is what English people do when they move to Wales! The correct pronunciation has nothing like a 'C' at the beginning. The 'Ll" should be pronounced the same way as it is in the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull ... does that help?
@@nigels.6051 I know this and you’re 100% right, but the letter c is easier to convey in written text, explaining the sound of Ll in text is tricky. I did point out this was an abysmal translation on my part.
I’m English, but I’ve lived near Llandudno for 30 years and it winds me up how many local Welsh people born and bred in Wales call it Landidno!
@@A_S_M_R "but the letter c is easier to convey in written text, " - it may be easier to convey, but why do so when there is no 'c' sound in the name? Like I said, it is something that English people do when they move to Wales and live here for 30 years. I assume that you, and many others, do hear a 'c' sound, even though it does not exist. It is said that your brain learns the sounds of the letters in the first 5 years of life, after that most people can never learn the true sounds. So if you are English, we do not expect you to ever get it right, however long you live here, while if you are Icelandic, no problem! It appears that Jay couldn't even read which letters were in the names, that at least is something that everyone can learn fairly easily, and hopefully he will before he tackles Wylfa, which would be a good story; I don't believe he could get permission to fly the drone, but it is a nice place for ground videography.
Oh dear, please try to pronounce the name of the station. Have you tried asking a local? And as for the stained music? What's the point of that?
I wonder how many of tonnes of CO2 this station has avoided emitting into the environment?
Twenty six years, isn't that a year beyond the design life?
Why would cooling water become radio active?
Not tryna throw stones, but that constant background soundtrack kinda cheapens what would be an otherwise interesting vid.... It 'americanises it'
Coal power stations emit more radiation.
Drought concern over dam… said man in rain coat in wales you utter weapon, but decent drone operator.
Bring on the SMRs
Yes, far more likely that the decayed and thus no longer radioactive contamination at the bottom of the lake will get buried under 100 meters of peat as the lake fills up under its new use as a carbon sink for the atmospheric CO2 contamination released by fossil fuel power due to insufficient use of nuclear power. That is what has always happened with lakes in Wales, most of the lakes left by the glaciers after the last ice age are already full of peat - our best CO2 store, much better than trees, which have very limited lives before their CO2 gets released.
It makes one wonder if any Nuclear or Thorium power plants are possible?
Yes you are correct, Neutron damage of steel is a problem for all reactors even if we manage to make a fusion reactor work this will still be a problem to be over come.
About forty years ago, on a very hot summers day, I swam in the lake, to one of it's islands. When I was 30 yards from shore, the water got icy cold, and I finally heated up whilst sunbathing for an hour on the island. I did not look forward to my return trip..!
over a hundred years to take it away. So far its said to be cheap energy, the real cost are over the next years , the burden on the tax payer, the profits are in other pockets.
Hmmm, you dont get something for nothing, 24 years of generation, just think about how much CO2 a coal or gas plant would have been pumped into the atmosphere
An informative video with good photography, thanks. I had never heard of this Magnox site.
Cheers!
Something wrong with the sound ....all sorts of weird noises in the background as if some idiot is trying to make it seem sinister?
I think the structures have a quite dystopian brutalist design, and wanted to lean into those vibes. Apologies to have interrupted you jerking off in your basement mate
@tjrr1999 good reply :-) no actually it helped
Poor research, poor pronunciation, poor dramatic background music, not a reliable video.
Been to Snowdonia countless times. Didn’t know bout the Magnos Power plant. Interesting stuff!
Over dramatic, highly biased, hysterical Radiophobia
?
@@FranckLarsen From Wiki _"Radiophobia is an irrational or excessive fear of ionizing radiation, leading to overestimating the health risks of radiation compared to other risks. It can impede rational decision-making and contribute to counter-productive behavior and policies. Radiophobia is primarily a social phenomenon as opposed to a purely psychological dynamic. The term is also used to describe the opposition to the use of nuclear technology (i.e. nuclear power) arising from concerns disproportionately greater than actual risks would merit."_
Been there fantastic place :-)
The lake “water” can’t be radioactive ☢️. Water itself can’t be radioactive, it’s the radioactive particles that might be lying about in the soils and silts in the lake but if you pointed a counter at the lake it won’t test higher than other lakes most likely unless you disturb the sediments.
It can, it could become tritiated water. Which, while weakly active and not a bio-concern, is indeed radioactive via neutron capture.
by ‘lake’ I mean the whole thing, including the sediment.
@@rob66181can it though? I think the Radiolais (or whatever it’s called) means that the decomposition would have already happened right (in reality not theory)? Making the “water” H2O and not H3O or TO2? I don’t knows I’m asking.
Plus tritiated water can be dangerous as while if only an Alpha emitter if drunk the body chemistry thinks it’s normal water and your cells and shit would absorb it right? Meaning you’d have all these little alpha emitters going round you like free radicals no?
Tritium is radioactive hydrogen and becomes ubiquitous in the environment. Not easy to measure so they don't.
The lake was originally designed to supply tap water for Liverpool.
magnox - literally no one else uses it. Its a terrible idea. BNF spent £100s of millions to try to make work. It was an obvious dead end. However thats not how UK gov contracts work.
since the 1960s molten salt designs were the obvious way to go. the uk as ever is about 30-50 years late on everything.
Molten salts have their own issues.
Molten Salt reactors have a load of issues. How many molten salt reactors on the planet are producing useful power? Answer me that.
@@allancopland1768 100% agree. had better start working on that now. Not only that but research creates high tech value jobs with the possibility of licencing IP.
Wow, great in depth video with excellent videography. I had no idea these works were so extensive. Greetings from Spain!
Interesting place
I know that Jay means well; however, harping about "nuclear contamination" just generates fear out of ignorance. Similar to people saying carcinogens. (You folks do know when you burn sugar to make caramel, there's carcinogens in it!) By telling people the radioactive isotopes causing the problem will also tell them how they were created or if it's material that has become radioactive from exposure. In addition, it lets people know the types of radiation (alpha, beta, or gamma) and the half life.
I once worked with a guy in the early 70s . He said he would go fishing near the plants out fall and would take the fish home to eat . I hope he is still ok to this date .
He did say the fish at the out fall were very large .
I have holidayed a lot with North Wales and I did hear talk the fuel was only half spent and taken out of the reactor . To supply the USA with bomb making material which was in short supply at the
time . Making the plant uneconomic .
The was also quite a lot of sea fishing near the outfall of Wylfa and still is at the two outfalls of Heysham - it's just that fish grow quicker in warmer water. Steam turbine power stations all need to dump some heat into the environment when they're working - that includes nuclear and coal.
The film maker seems to think there must have been a lot of radioisotopes coming out of the pipes like it was Wales version of Windscale or Dounreay but really it never was and there's a lot of scaremongering in this film tbh.
It's quite an alarmingly ugly eyesore in an area of otherwise pretty countryside though - which makes you think about what it was possible to get past the planners in the 50's and 60's compared to today... They did get a noted landscape architect (Sylvia Crowe) in to beautify the immediate area around the station but there's no hiding the huge concrete blocks.
What a load of tripe. Rarely has a TH-cam video been produced with such a lack of research into such a wide range of subjects. I hereby sentence you to produce another video on a similar subject in Wales, this time the Wylfa NPS on Anglesey, but in Welsh.
Strangely, the small hydro power stations built in the area have produced more electricity than the Nuclear power station. The turbines are still spinning while decommissioning continues.
I don't think that is actually true. While it rains a lot in the area, the amount of hydroelectric potential is actually quite small. While Maentwrog is quite a big hydro plant, rated at 30MW, it only averages 10MW. Trawsfynedd, when operating, was 500MW, so the only way you could get close, would be to include the pumped storage, which doesn't really count, since it doesn't generate power, only stores it.
@@nigels.6051 I would like to get more data, that is reliable. The nuclear power station was, due to its problems, not producing electricity all of the time.
I would like to see the costs per MW for the dam and power station for their life times.
Costs are going to be incurred for the next 60 years for both schemes. My grandchildren will be retiring from work when the projected clean up is completed!
@@robinwhitebeam4386 It is quite hard to find good data on hydro, since most of it is very small scale and often not separately categorised. There are a lot of hydro schemes in Wales, there is one just up the valley from me, but like most, it is measured in KW, not MW. We just don't have enough water, or enough height to create the power.
I agree that nuclear is going to be the more expensive, but hydro doesn't provide enough, so can't replace nuclear, however much is spent on it. We don't have the water, or height that Norway or Iceland have.
Wind is the cheap answer, far cheaper than hydro or nuclear. That is why in the past 12 months, wind has been our largest source of electricity, exceeding fossil fuels, while hydro is only at about 1.3% of our electricity with most of our potential hydro power already tapped! I don't see the need for nuclear, except that most of our wind turbines are easy targets for submarine attack, so would give us a problem in wartime, it is good to have some variety of sources.
@@nigels.6051
Wind, just as with solar, is not reliable enough for all our energy requirements.
And demand for electricity is increasing.
@@pauln6803 Wind in the UK is reliable. Yes, we have periods of low wind, so we need some storage, but we don't need much storage for our electricity supply, just need enough wind turbines to produce enough electricity 98% of the time. Then storage is needed for the synthetic fuels produced when electricity supply is greater than demand, There will be periods of low wind when we don't make much synthetic fuel, and periods when we make a lot. Storing synthetic aviation fuel, and synthetic methane gas is easy. Amongst other things, the methane can be used to top up our electricity on very low wind days, replacing our current natural gas, which is mainly methane, There are other solutions, but nuclear is many times more expensive than wind!
A follow up with a Geiger counter would be interesting. Readings taking along the routes people use hiking and visiting etc. Reading of the water in the main lake, lake bed sampling, plus water and silt samples downstream to see how much nuclear material is getting past the dam. Samples taken safely.
P.S. It's nice and convenient to say the decommissioning company has to clean up the mess. The government commissioned the site, so should bear the bulk of the responsibility. Magnox is government owned in a way, but it can plead poverty. It only has limited resources. The government as a whole has far more. Clean up will take generations.
BTW. I see folk saying breeder reactors and the like are safe. Safer perhaps, but whenever a fission reaction occurs on a scale great enough to produce megawatts of energy, there will be fission byproducts. Many of them emit ionizing radiation and some have very long half lives. All of that waste needs to be stored. Maybe okay on 1000 mile wide deserted plains or steppe, but maybe not so safe on earthquake prone islands like Japan or NZ (hydroelectric is the way to go here in nuclear free NZ -- so much potential because it rains so bloody much -- about 55-60% of our total energy mix is hydro and geothermal -- that mix includes energy we use for cars like petrol, so it's not bad going).
P.S. My grandma was Welsh. She would not be amused to hear those damn Saxons messed up Snowdonia.
N.b. A Geiger counter won't pick up Alpha particles
Chernobyl is abundant with wildlife too but I wouldn't go there.
I think more information about how far potential radiation is spread through the area would be more useful
Was the reactor a plutonium manufacturing plant for Cold War nuclear weapons as wher the magnox reactors on the seven estuary, electricity being a by-product, 24.5 per cent of the plutonium produced hinckley point ended up in nuclear warheads.
Lake Karachay is something else!
Lake Karachay is a lake no more. It was filled in quite some time ago.
@@allancopland1768 exactly. And before that it was not comparable to here…. Having been used for direct cooling of reactors and ‘disposal’ of waste - as I understand it
Visited there in the 70s.
Excellent synopsis, thanks
very interesting short documentary jay, never knew was a man made lake. i do agree a bit about choice music, think it would be loads better a bit more up beat, less dramatic movie. years since i drove past this. have subscribed 👍 look foward to some more factual storys
Thanks for the feedback, I will certainly take this into account. Music was more of an artistic choice, as I feel these structures do evoke a sort of dark dystopian vibe but I understand peoples issue with that
2:25 "Each reactor produced around 250 Megawatt electric." What? If your understanding of basic science is so poor, you shouldn't be making this sort of video,.
We would have missed the excellent camerawork, the beauty of Wales and the useful historical information.
@@luisbustamante9869 He should have made a video about "the excellent camerawork, the beauty of Wales and the useful historical information." and dropped the scaremongering bs.
His statement is actually correct in this case, although the use of English is not great! The reactors actually produced far more than 250MW each, but that was thermal power. By the time it had gone through the turbines and been converted into electricity, there was 250 MW of electricity, which in power generation is referred to as 250 MWe, which tends to get read as "250 megawatt electric", even by the BBC.
@@nigels.6051"that was thermal power" That was waste heat.
"even by the BBC" nothing to be proud of, the BBC is notorious in its ignorance of basic science (they think it's only for car mechanics). I'll be interested to see your link to a case of this. I'll use it to make a complaint to the BBC.
Audio-Level is all over the place
Apologies, I’m still learning!
Sorry, but this is not a helpful contribution, well, start at least. I'm writing this at time point 2.10. Having not researched enough to know some basic pronunciation, namely the 'Ll' and 'dd' sound, it worries me. Also, the 'not actually correct facts from the start' setting the scene does not a favour 'context'. Context is everything in the debate and reasoning as to why choices where made, where we are today, and choices we make for the future. I'm neither critic of, nor advocate for. But a lot of cherry picking of sound bite facts is not good reportage.
Trouse- fin- eth, is how it is pronounced.
Personally, I love this propaganda and I thought your Welsh pronunciation was lovely!
Won’t be fully decommissioned till 2083, only ran for 24 years.
its not the BNF way. stringing out long term contracts is the way. Great returns and its not like the project is going to get cancelled half way though. Of course you could invest in science to actually process the waste and make safe on much shorter timescales - but... whod want that?
@@mrrolandlawrence This is why it's many times more expensive to d-commission one than it cost to build in the first place,
[Rusty] carbon steel invented in britain
In notice the English don't mind polluting wales .
As a teenager I spent many a time fishing in the lake!! A sample of the fish to be caught could be seen in the hot pool! ALL dead of course!! These were retrieved swiftly, to stop the spread of bad news!!😮
1:12 "SAFETY HELMETS MUST BE WORN BEYOND THIS POINT" - nobody wears a helmet ;D
Got about 30s into this - clicked away. Sorry - that music sets the tone as a 'propaganda piece'. Good luck.
I'd say it's more ominous and industrial, fitting for the documentary
It's called extrapulating from incomplete data
Fair enough, creative choice
lol wot, propaganda? how? its a guy talking about a radioactive lake lolllllll
You wrote your critique opinion all within 30 seconds 🤣🤣 I would class that as possibly your 'own brand' propaganda 😂
Not hard to find the proper pronunciation mate, or even a close approximation.
EDIT - Sorry to sound negative, I see you're a small channel and so I've subbed as the content is well made - except for the pronunciation!
Thank you for the feedback, I’ll be sure to try and approximate to the correct pronunciation better in the future
You should have asked a local how that's pronounced 😂
Came here to make exactly that comment.
Traws, as in 'Trous'ers, Fyn as in 'Fun', Ydd as in 'F'. Trous Fun F... That's the easy way to say it, without drowning everyone in saliva...
Traws vun i the
This got me too, as a Welsh speaker. The second word of the video as well >< 'Traws' (rhymes with 'house' - means 'across'), 'fynydd' (mutated form of 'mynydd' meaning 'mountain') pronounced to rhyme so that 'fyn' rhymes with 'bun' bun with a 'v' sound at the start, and the 'yth' is the schwa vowel sound in 'the' followed by the consonant in 'the' - so in a way like 'the' backwards, putting the vowel before the consonant.
My mates farm is opposite this ! Davies at goppa!
The radiation level could be 1,000x what it is presently, and it'd still be negligible. You getting paid by Shell or BP?
15 times the cancer rates downwind, and twice the cancer risk for eating fish, dork.
Who are you paid by, The Government/? Nuclear regulation authority?
I sponsored the low level Radiation Campaign(Chris Busby et al)for 10 years.His theory that microparticles(of radioactive waste) are carcinogenic at cellular level seems credible to me.Those who dismiss his work never address this factor.
When I caught that three eyed fish that glowed in the dark.
I did wonder about radioactive contamination.. 🐠 ⚛️
Please don't talk about the 'legacy' of places you can't say properly, or you're gonna look silly. It' not hard - Welsh has perhaps the most consistent phonology of any language, If you're not sure how it's pronounced: look up Welsh phonology and that's pretty much it (until you get to mutations). Which is [why it's 'Trawsfynydd' and not 'Trawsmynydd'] is a harder question. If you spent 50 hours making this video, an hour or diving into welsh pronunciation wouldn't hurt and could be fun and informative.
I've never heard it called Trawsmynydd. The normal spelling in Welsh is Drawsfynydd, and in English it is always Trawsfynydd, both pronounced as spelt, so if he had asked a true local, the answer may have been Drawsfynedd, which would have been wrong for his English language video!
Such a beautiful place to be destroyed by radiation??? Its already in everything around this plant. I would be curious to take a Geiger counter and see what the levels really are.
Are you sure Hinckley Point is not 2 x 1.5 GW?
Hinkley Point C i(still under cronstruction, years late and way over budget) is a pair of French/Chinese buit reactors planned output of 3200MWe Output is a big round ZERO MWe at the moment.
@@allancopland1768 I just checked; 1600 MWe each. EPR pressure reactor made by a company called Framatome in France. The last boilermaker on Teesside went out of business decades ago. We don't make anything anymore.
@@dieselhead24 2 * 1600MWe as I said. You left out the Chinese involvment. Framatome are notorious for not delivering on time.
Went to visit in 1997 on a school trip - never found any 3 eyed fish sadly 😳
excellent
Thank you Jay for informing us of the situation and in my view, what is still there to come
I used to drive from Abertysswg in the South Wales Rhymney valley all over Wales spectating on the Motoring News, Welsh and the RAC rallies in the 60's and the 70's.
I remember being in the Penmachno forest many times and seeing Transfynydd Nuclear Power Station far away in the distance. As the nuclear power stations were being built the BBC news said that the nuclear industry would now generate cheap electricity for the public.
You are correct about the decommissioning, it is scheduled to be 2071 but that is guesswork by well researched academics (!!!!), and who is going to pays for this ???
US - WE PAY FOR EVERYTHING - AND I AM EXPECTING NUMEROUS CRITICS SAYING I AM WRONG. JUST ASK THEM TO LOOK AT WHO PAYS FOR THE DECOMMISSIONING OF THE OLD NORTH SEA OIL RIGS ??? THEY WILL SAY THE OIL INDUSTRY - BUT THE OIL INDUSTRY GET TAX REBATES FROM OUR GOVERNMENT TO HELP THE OIL INDUSTRY PAY MORE TO THEMSELVES AND THEIR SHARE OWNERS AND HELP WITH PARTY DONATIONS ALSO - AND I BET THE NUCLEAR DECOMMISSIONING COMPANIES WILL USE EXACTLY THE SAME TAX LOOPHOLES AND INCENTIVES.
I grew up in Portmadoc (Porthmadog) in the 1960's. Your pronunciation of placenames is awful. A quick chat with the locals would have put you right. I did enjoy the historical overview. But you built the video around a nothing. Radioctive lake? Get real. And "Welsh rain forest"? Dhhhh.
It literally is an ancient welsh rainforest though.. with a lot of very rare plant life. Some local you are
Three Eyed Fish.
Do try to do some research on correct pronunciation of Welsh place-names please. They're not difficult to learn! Imagine what you'd think of me if I pronounced English place-names using my native Welsh phonetics!
I would understand that you couldn’t possibly know every single dialect in the world and move on 😂
Hmm, if you went to Mousehole and called it "Mouse hole", then it would be understandable, because it is spelt differently to how the locals pronounce it - "mowzel", but if you were making a video about it, of course you would be expected to get it correct. You could of course give it it's original name of Porthenys, which you can probably pronounce better than most English people, since it is in Cornish, with Cornish spelling.
The problem with Trawsfynyð is not that it is spelt wrong, but that Welsh uses a different alphabet, the letters have different sounds to English, with different rules for pronouncing them, so the English can't read it correctly. If we actually used the correct character for the last letter then people might realise that they can't read it, but instead we use 'dd' for ease of typing, then the English pronounce it as a 'd' instead of 'ð'! The Icelanders can pronounce it fine, they actually use 'ð' in their language, although like in Welsh, they use 'll' instead of 'ɬ', which was used in old Welsh, before the arrival of the English printing press with no 'ɬ' characters.
Mrs Richards: "I paid for a room with a view !"
Basil: (pointing to the lovely view) "That is Torquay, Madam ."
Mrs Richards: "It's not good enough!"
Basil: "May I ask what you were expecting to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window ? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plains?..."
Mrs Richards: "Don't be silly! I expect to be able to see the sea!"
Basil: "You can see the sea, it's over there between the land and the sky."
Mrs Richards: "I'm not satisfied. But I shall stay. But I expect a reduction."
Basil: "Why?! Because Krakatoa's not erupting at the moment ?"
WHO IS SHAGGING ALL THE SHEEP ?
And they tell us that nuclear power is clean and cheap😂 nothing could be further from the truth.
You're forgetting or ignoring the word "relatively". Obviously it's not cleaner than some renewables, but compared to burning coal etc it's massively cleaner. "Cheap" depends on who's building it but it's always cheaper than the current multi trillion pound cost of pollution from coal and other fossil fuels. Even including Chernobyl and Fukushima. By miles. One word can be important, e.g. the difference you're not wrong and, y'know, you're wrong.
No doubt in my mind that nuclear pollution in the enviroment is the real reason why so many people get cancer in the present day. They try to blame smoking. Well, thanks to the ongoing persecution of smokers, far fewer people smoke now than at the time of the first world war when cancer was comparatively rare. I have no defence whatsoever against the carcenogenic pollution in our enviroment - might as well enjoy a good cigar.
Sorry, but the link between smoking and cancer is as clear as the link between falling downwards and gravity. Life expectancy at birth in Europe in 1900 was in the low 40s. Cancer was less common in those days simply because most people didn't live long enough to get cancer.
Just cover Wales in solar panels and pray that the sun comes out.
lol, you'll be a fossil before that works !
Oh that's just a stupid idea, no one would ever do that.
A necessary evil sorry to say.
Bygones but anagram of nuclear is unclear
You could've ironed your shirt knowing that you were going to appear on camera. Dressing like you're in Antifa doesn't aid credibility and is far more offensive than dodgy pronunciation.
pffhh... okay mum ! 🙄 I'm quite shocked to see how many people are picking on a small TH-camr's video here... So he did pronounce names wrong, ..ever seen an(y) american documentary ? They don't even care (in most cases), they'll just give cities/places their own names !!
What does a member of Antifa dress like?
I mean given that it's a collective of separate far left/anarchist groups and individuals, one might struggle to pinpoint a formal uniform.
26 pathetic years and an unfixable mess. typical nuclear
Whereas Coal and oil fired powerstations have had nothing to do with global warming?
@@catlee8064 Will we ever really know?
the symbol for Wales is a Dragon 🏴 I had no idea there were also this monster in Wales 😳 a Brilliant exposure of this hidden hazard hiding in plain sight 🤔
I really like this video. But I really, really don't like this place. It's a place of stunning beauty completely messed up by our need for energy.
Get rid of your tv, oven, electrical goods etc then..
It's in Wales; Who cares?