If they wanted to do a proper job of it, they would've designed Sellafield better on creation. But because of cost cutting at the beginning, it's made doing a proper job of it even more hazardous and costly today.
@@koolyman exactly, so having the media be like "look how expensive this is!!!!" trying to drum up ghate for nuclear because of these epenses. all it could ever lead to is peopl ein future calling for less money inot nuclear and thus more cost cutting that leads to this sort of problem, or worse.
@@ge2719 However it does show that perhaps the overall extraordinary cost of nuclear power is not worth it; and that we should rely far more sustainable, renewable sources... That is until the boffins develop fusion, but that is currently quite distant.
@@koolyman the cost decreasws the more tech we develop just lioe all tech. To stop using a source of energy this abundant and powerfull because we didnt use it properly in the past woiod be silly logic. by the logic we would have stopped uaing petrolium all togethwr after we found out leaded petrol was bad. We wouod have gotten rid of fridges when we found out cfls were making a hole in he ozone. we will never develop cleaner and cheaper methods of nuclear power if we stop investing in nuclear energy. We can invest in both.
Because money is never a factor in these situations, right? Just vote for the proper green candidate who can simply 'will' a solution into existence, yes?
I heard £50 billion is spent on corrosion prevention in the UK every year so £54 billion for an entire project doesn't seem like much in that perspective.
@Phil Weatherley the project is almost complete, they are ready to start retrieving the waste. Only thing holding it back is the plant where it is going to be stored, due to Covod 19 there has been some delays.
@@owlman4167 okay Jesus mad respect but not really, sure its not as contaminated as it used to be but there are places in Russia 200km away where levels are just as high as the middle of the exclusion zone due to rain 2 days after the incident, inside the reactor is still very radioactive and if one were to live in the exclusion zone and indeed those within 200kn receive dangerously high long term doses, there are many hot spots and contaminated objects as well as location that were not cleaned, so yes residential areas and roads are "okay" but forests and soil is very bad as well as the level of ionized particles which was very high until the new arch was fitted, so it is still very contaminated and would be more so had it not been for the sacrificial cleanup efforts
When you're cheap and don't cough up the money needed to process nuclear waste right from the beginning, you'll just end up with an even more expensive and dangerous mess later.
Tuppoo94 Processing nuclear waste is often dangerous and not economical considering how much cheaper it is to just buy more fuel. This is a problem of old storage techniques that aren't used anymore(at least not in the west). Nowadays it is stored in movable concrete capsules that are monitored constantly and can be moved and buried or further encased if any danger of leakage exists.
@@simonphoenix3789 not right, after reprocessing the storage is simplified, and the time required for storage is reduced. Yeah its an expense. but its worth it when you consider the results.
Sellafield’s worst known accident was in November of 1983 when radioactive wastes escaped into the Irish sea. These wastes were produced during reprocessing. In other words, they WERE processing nuclear wastes they made.
Sellafield aka Windscale dates originally from a time when no one gave a damn about nuclear safety and they just dumped things down old mine shafts or in the sea. There's supposed to be some tanks containing things dumped there that have no records of what they are.
Dumping things down old mine shafts is exactly what the recent proposal for new coal mines in Cumbria is all about; when the mines are exhausted, with shafts deep under the Irish Sea, the exhausted mines will be back-filled with nuclear waste.
You're spewing nonsense and lies. You can't just dump high level radioactive waste into the sea. You can't hide something like that. Someone somewhere would detect it. The only attempts was made with throwing it into subduction zones of the tectonic plates, but that's stupid. That waste isn't a waste. It's precious material for the future industry.
@J S they dumped metal barrels into the sea until 1992 when it was banned. There's an extensive video about it on here. Some of the barrels rusted away, some are still intact.
@J S we might have stopped in the 80s but the international agreement was in 1992. Pipeline discharges from Sellafield and La Hague are still permitted though there are 2020 and 2030 targets for a reduction.
@J S sea discharges involve releasing low level waste directly into the sea. Sea dumping involves dumping barrels into the sea. They both involve disposing of waste into the sea. I'm saying that the end of barrel dumping was not the end of dumping waste into the sea.
The 11% nuclear levy on electricity bills has not been put aside for dealing with decommissioning costs and waste, but spent on building more nuclear power stations like Sizewell B. Economists estimate that the income from the levy between 1990-98 alone was over £9bn. The industry was privatised and the taxpayer robbed for over 50 billion pounds...
I am here because of Kraftwerk's concert song "Radio-Activity" where they mentioned Sellafield. I had not heard of it before, and was curious. Thank you Kraftwerk for raising awareness of some upsetting truths.
It says something that Sellafield is trying to contain their waste so tightly. Natural Gas and Coal can pump it freely into the air for everyone to breathe every day. Maybe they should be subject to the same standards. Surely their bottom line wouldn't be impacted... would it?
The original 1975 version of "Radio-Activity" didn't have the nuclear disaster sites' names in the lyrics, they added them for the 1991 remixed & rearranged version of the song, along with "Harrisburg", "Chernobyl", "Hiroshima" (recently swapped for "Fukushima").
Hello from Ireland. Thanks for giving us radioactive beaches and waterways on the east coast of the country. We appreciate your trash so much. Many thanks
Sorry on behalf of the majority here who never agreed to it and are getting the same problems down our west coast. Good old tories are after a new round of nuclear reactors despite not clearing up the mess from the first lot!
"Sellafield is planning on abandoning that contract... they say they've now found a simpler quicker way to clean up the mess" - hahaha I was almost expecting him to say "Ah, we're gonna dump it in the ocean"... but he didn't. :)
Superpureeliteful I always thought the Baltic Sea was even worse. I have read that Sellafield is partially to blame for that. Sweden is mostly to blame. People eat the fish caught in the Baltic Sea as if they don't know about it. I don't eat those fish or any fish from the Pacific. Probably the Atlantic is very radioactive too. No one is going to tell us otherwise.
@@Bevity I'm quite sure it is not Sweden nor Finland to blame for the radioactivity in the Baltic but the ussr and Poland. However that is not why you shouldn't eat fish from the Baltic sea that is mercury and other heavy metals that partly is there naturally and partly becourse the ussr didn't understand that the ocean don't just make things disappear however most ppl in the west thought the same up till the 70's
Kenneth Hermann I guess my point is... not exactly who is the biggest radioactive polluter of the Baltic Sea, but that there are SO MANY sources. I know about the mercury, dioxins, PCBs, etc. too. It is a small body of water that only has about 1% water exchange with other bodies of water, so all of this pollution just keeps building up. I went to Poland and ordered fish at a restaurant, forgetting where the fish came from. It was so good, and enormous portions. I remembered after, but it was only the once. Don't eat fish from the Baltic Sea!
@@riverdeep399 Background radiation is STILL radiation. You are being irradiated right now. You'll probably survive it, because your body repairs radiation damage (mostly - read the small print). The world is less radioactive now than it has ever been. If you understood what radiation was, you'd already know this. Life evolved under much heavier radioactivity. The Irish Sea is fucking cold to swim in, and definitely makes one tingle.
intolerable is an industry term, its not "intolerable" in the human sense/definition of the term. it means that it needs to be replaced/repaired as soon as possible it doesnt mean that it is an immediate danger
odd they dont really invest cash into research that might substantially reduce the amount of waste. odd because since the 1950s quite a lot of progress has been made in nuclear science. just look at france for instance. 90%+ nuclear and renewable. cleanest air in europe. trust the brits to hamfist the whole process. solid fuel nuclear reactors need to be made a thing of the past with improved technology.
It's because it's weapons waste, not standard commercial waste :/ In commercial waste, the radioactive stuff is kept trapped within the fuel & the cladding. So it's really not too hard to deal with. But if you want to get to the juicy weapons plutonium that's also stuck in the fuel, you have to dissolve the cladding/fuel. Which of course releases the trapped radioactive elements and liquifies already nasty stuff, making it much harder to clean up. This is bad enough when they do a "good" job, let alone the absolute messes they made with early weapons programs. (For an example of what I'm talking about, compare commercial "dry casks" to the barrels of liquid weapons waste at Hanford, WA)
Winscale had a nuclear disaster in the 60s when the plant caugh fire spread radioactive material around cumbria and Ireland ranked 5 out of 7 in nuclear disaster scale Britain government covered it up until the 80s. Perently 2 times higher then the bombs on japan.
you can slag Sellafield off all you want but that won't deal with the issue and money should be no object! we need to get this done properly safely and correctly no matter how much it costs we owe it to ourselves our children and Europe and the rest of the world to
FINALLY, Someone who understands why it needs to be done. A lot of people in these comments who don't understand the potential severity of the situation. Let's leave it and let it collapse, save our 54b and contaminate the Northern hemisphere.
Solar, Wind, Tidal and Dams surely have a massive place when the long term costs of nuclear are taken into account, Good luck to the good people at sellafield who are clearing stuff up, but surely we worked out that nuclear overall isn't worth it when the hidden extended costs involved are taken into account? maybe fusion can come along but we need a cleaner source of energy.
@@thomashambly3718 Except from the massive amounts of GHGs from the cement used to make the power plant, the diesel burnt to mine the uranium, the cement used for waste storage etc. etc. it adds up, it is not zero.
@@uber1337hakz How about the cost and damage to the earth to find the rare metals needed for solar panels? They move mountains to find indium, neodymium and others rare metals.
You did not see a leaking silo because it is not there The building is not great, not terrible its equilvent to a chest x ray This man is delusional, take him to the infirmary
Actually it costs the tax-payer the same as about 40 X-rays, HS2 is more like 400 chest x-rays, and those Chinese building Hinckley point C are getting 4 million chest x-rays!
yabadoo completely agree with you, if radiation was so dangerous, all airline pilots, and all people on the ISS should end up far worse than they do. They experience far more radiation than someone working at the sellafield plant would on a daily basis.
I spent a week there during work experience and got lots of amazing tours from a guy pretty high up and all I can legally say is that one of the storage sites is so fucked that it is literally a ticking time bomb
Marcus Reynolds Great. :/ and still they want more nuke plants. It ain't to help with the energy crisis, that's for sure. What god awful weapon are they constructing now...
Along the south east coast of Ireland theirs an unusually high rate of birth defects, children born with cancers ect. It's a hot spot for cancer in Ireland actually. I recall an effort by the Irish public back in the 90s to highlight the dangers of sellafield which involved flooding government ministers offices with pictures of deformed children. Polliticians looked the other way of course.
In terms of radiation, the plant director reports no more than 3.6 roentgen. I‘m told its the equivalent of a chest x-ray. So if you are overdue for a check up you can go there
so... 2billions euro to get the job done, 48b for greasing that fat bureaucratic British machine yup! it's all there, no mistakes... it would've cost 3billions to get it done thank god with the bureaucracy in place we saved 1b.. it's about how much senses there is to it....
This had nothing to do with electricity. It was the result of the weapons program during the cold War. Past generations were careless with producing the plutonium, so current generations are tasked with cleaning it up. You think 54 billion is a lot, let's just abandon it, see what happens when the most dangerous building in Europe collapses.
Nothing says safe like crumbling open air ponds and buildings with no records of what's in them full of hazardous waste that they used to dump into the sea.
Wrong. Thorium reactors produce uranium 232 which is highly radioactive, so much so that humans can not handle it as in get anywhere near it. Only with remote control and video can you manipulate U232.
The leak from the old containment building is about 3.6 Roentgen per hour, not great but not horrifying. I'm told it's the equivalent of a chest x-ray.
Just stick the waste in 55 galon steel barrels and dump it in the North Sea. Simple and time tested method used by almost everybody with practicaly everything in the past. Or send it to India.
This is why nuclear power shouldn’t be used. The building is falling apart. Try putting money into the nhs and finding good dr’s in the AnE departments at Penrith and Carlise and consultants along with Birbeck medical group. All about money again and people who try to convince us they have this under control.
it started when it was called Windscale. They classed filters in the chimney as a folly but it helped when they cut fins on the uranium shuttles to speed up plutonium harvesting. It caused the reactor to catch fire and those filters saved a lot of pollution. Now they want a deep storage at Theddlethorpe for high level waste, knowing funds are tight we fear the worst here.
@@mindoza44 As far as the bomb was concerned, anything the Yanks did the Brits had to do as well…..well not so well, but they got there in the end.....now to get out.
people blame nuclear power for sellafield but almost all the high grade nuclear waste is from nuclear weapons. ditch trident, keep nuclear power it's clean, safe (the safest of any power generation) and it doesn't spew toxic waste into the environment like lithium batteries, solar panel manufacture or coal
Site with buildings and pools of radioactive waste requiring a 100 year cleanup = good. Solar panels = bad. You're just as ignorant as people who think coal and oil are cleaner than solar.
@@danem2215 when did I say solar bad? All I did was try to point out that people like you who think that nuclear forms "pools" (seriously 😂 sad) and who think there's no waste or deaths from solar are pathetic children who don't care about the planet and only about their own egos
So far there is a far bigger ticking time bomb in France at lest we admitt to the problem (even if the waste is being dumped secretly in a so called coal mine on anglesey ) they dont think they have a problem , but all their nuclear stations are coming to the end of their lives and radiation does not respect borders (Chernobyl )
Legacy off the worst nuclear accident until chernodyll. This is the waste left over from the accident. Famous last words. Dont worry it safe, we have learnt from our last failures.
Milking government funds knowing they have authority over a barrel and can dictate costs, this then secures massive profits. They will probably get the job done but not until the maximum amount of money has been extorted from the taxpayer. Another example of not being able to control costs and the contractor will never admit that they, the contractor don't really care. It's always about profit.
Sellafield "limited" takings tonnes of cash, just to change plan, in several years they'll do the same and say it will take even more money and even more time. Can't trust businesses to do a fast job if they're given bigger hand outs for doing a slow job.
Latest idea is to stick the waste into exhausted coal mines; building coal mines close to Sellafield site has just been approved for "coking coal" for steel production.
@@tommorris3688 By the time it becomes a real health hazard on a day to day basis you and anyone yet to be born will all be dead from old age so never mind the cost enjoy the "free" energy production while they are still allowed to do it. BTW, did you know that low level radiation over a prolonged period is the cheapest form of birth control and you don't have to take any pills to achieve 100% success? it's Nature's answer to the over population problem and also biodiversity.
I know we need nuclear alongside green energy, but what could 54 BILLION have been spent on with regards to clean energy ? Tidal barrages, more wind turbines, subsidies for the installation of solar panels ?
Why do we not use the undergound facilities built in English mines to store radioactive waste, they are very secure and built with various layers of concrete and protection to seal it off from leakage for 2000 years
Tony_Fcking_Montana we're over run with them. Just waiting until they realise. This is thanks to Baby Boomer greed. They shafted their children. What a legacy.
if they sank a nuke there they would potentially harm themselves. When the 1 reactor melted down in chernobyl the whole world detected radiation after a few days. Imagine what would happen if a nuke spewed thousands of tons of nuclear waste into the atmosphere. It would be like a slow burning mutually assured destruction .
@@snowflakemelter1172 it would kick it up into the atmosphere. Bombs are notorious for spreading radiation so dropping one on waste would likely enhance the amount of radiation being spread.
Personnel bullied for raising health and safety concerns ???? We need to find out the management who behaved in this manor, instenous dismissals followed by prosicution.
@Bunker Sieben Yes, putted shortly lead is the stable form of Uranium. And that's why it is so good at stopping radiation, beta and gamma rays in particular : it remains very dense, and full of electrons.
Take some soil samples around, get your vacuum dust sampled. It will probably contain a higher than acceptable traces of plutonium. That depends on how far you are from that area. But if you live within 15 miles of sellafield, I would consider moving.
@@EinkOLED the vacuum dust wont contain any plutonium... having radiation itself doesn't mean there is plutonium nearby. but yeah he should definitely get a Geiger counter. it should just be safe background radiation. not necessarily alpha/beta waves from the nuclear site. i can pick up a random rock from the middle of nowhere and it should be slightly radioactive.
Super deadly nuclear waste directly below my feet? Better poke at the lid with a stick! I think they have no idea about how to treat it, and those cost estimates are insane.
Honestly you need to see some of the clowns that work at sellafield.Half or more are not qualified and only get the jobs because of family and friends.Really clicky place to work and mark my words this place will get uncovered very soon.Ask anyone who works there what they do and the response you normally get is not much we just sit watching TV on our phones now that's worrying.Totty towers as it's known is another issue the bosses can't and won't deal with.Its all about the money.A ticking timebomb ready to go boom.
That's just bad design though, seems pretty logical that you create a storage solution that makes sure that you can easily transfer waste in the future. We should just start building thorium reactors though.
The latest development is that the new coal mines that are proposed for Cumbria, with mine shafts just a few kilometres from Sellafield, is that the coal mines, when exhausted and empty of coal, will be used to store fragments of nuclear waste cast into cement (for example Silicon Carbide matrix cement). There is a lot of nuclear hardware to dispose of: Calder Hall (Windscale) nuclear reactor parts, THORP reprocessing apparatus parts, nuclear reactors from defunct Trident submarines, advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGR's) that will soon be decommissioned, a MAGNOX reactor that will soon be decommissioned, as well as pits of nuclear slurry at Sellafield that are rusting and rotting away. Digging coal in Cumbria is just a "smoke screen" to hide what is going on with creating an underground nuclear waste dump. The mining company involved is based in the Cayman Islands so will not be paying tax to the UK Government and probably cannot be sued if anything goes wrong when storing nuclear waste in the exhausted coal mines. The shafts of the proposed mines will extend deep under the Irish Sea. If the aforementioned cement encapsulation fails, the de facto nuclear dump provided by the exhausted coal mines will pollute the whole of the Irish East coast and the Scottish West coast. Because no other councils are prepared to accept high level nuclear waste in mainland UK, and Northern Ireland has also rejected becoming a nuclear waste dump, the UK Government is now (via the proposed coal mines) hoisting an underground nuclear waste dump on Cumbria. Moreover, the Cumbria Council unanimously accepted the situation at a recent meeting when the issue of approving the coal mines was voted upon. The fact that the coal mines will eventually become a nuclear waste dump (referred to as a "repository") is the "big ghost" in the cupboard that everybody in the Cumbria council knows about, but nobody dares speak openly about. i submit that open discussion is urgently required so that, if the coal mines are to be used as a nuclear repository, that the job should be done properly and thoroughly, and not in an amateur half-done "cowboy" manner that is so typical of infrastructure projects in the United Kingdom.
@@tonyduncan9852 - Gen4 molten salt reactors are years away, if ever. There are very many hurdles that must be overcome before they are accepted for use. Moreover, there are competing technologies such as X-energy pebble bed reactors that can also be made to function with Thorium pebbles, and are a favoured reactor type by US military.
@@tommorris3688 "Gen4 molten salt reactors are years away, if ever" - I don't think so. The first was commissioned in the mid-sixties. "There are very many hurdles that must be overcome before they are accepted for use" - It depends on whether one wishes to consume ALL possible materials, or instead go for a simple system without graphite moderation which could run for several decades before decommissioning. "competing technologies such as X-energy pebble bed reactors" - These aren't simple or cheap, or even long-lived. "favoured reactor type by US military" - that's no recommendation.
@@tonyduncan9852 - Some factual errors in your missive. Thorium LFTR will not appear any time soon. Dr Alvin Weinberg's reactor was a very primitive test setup. A commercial design of Thorium LFTR is a totally different undertaking. People like Dr Kirk Sorensen have never built or operated a Thorium LFTR, so do not be beguiled by his overenthusiastic TH-cam videos. I have found him wrong technically on several issues. Many people describe him as an over-enthusiastic "zealot", that is very dangerous when the audience is ill-informed and beguiled by emotion.
@@tommorris3688 "Some factual errors - Dr Alvin Weinberg's reactor was a very primitive test setup" - Primitive it certainly was - but it was still a MSR. "A commercial design of Thorium LFTR is a totally different undertaking" - I agree. It should be made as a centre of excellence first. But I prefer the simple MSR because it is known technology. "Kirk Sorensen has never built or operated a Thorium LFTR" - but he is an ex-NASA engineer with a good record. "do not be beguiled" - I'm not. "I have found him wrong technically on several issues" - I wonder how. "very dangerous" - so is fire.
Ahem. Chernobyl is in Europe. And yes, it is more radioactively contaminated, no matter how you look at it. :-D I don't doubt this could be #2, though. Although old USSR has several more contenders, but they might not be in Europe.
I've just found out that the chippy in Sellafield has closed down.
What a shame, they used to serve a lovely leg of cod there...
Does Mr. Nightmare know this?
That's funny.
fish have legs?
@@darkshadowsx5949 Coelacanths do.
Brilliant 😂
Typical of Britain's mainstream media : it's all about money.
Maybe, in this case, doing a proper job is more important?
If they wanted to do a proper job of it, they would've designed Sellafield better on creation. But because of cost cutting at the beginning, it's made doing a proper job of it even more hazardous and costly today.
@@koolyman exactly, so having the media be like "look how expensive this is!!!!" trying to drum up ghate for nuclear because of these epenses. all it could ever lead to is peopl ein future calling for less money inot nuclear and thus more cost cutting that leads to this sort of problem, or worse.
@@ge2719 However it does show that perhaps the overall extraordinary cost of nuclear power is not worth it; and that we should rely far more sustainable, renewable sources... That is until the boffins develop fusion, but that is currently quite distant.
@@koolyman the cost decreasws the more tech we develop just lioe all tech. To stop using a source of energy this abundant and powerfull because we didnt use it properly in the past woiod be silly logic. by the logic we would have stopped uaing petrolium all togethwr after we found out leaded petrol was bad. We wouod have gotten rid of fridges when we found out cfls were making a hole in he ozone. we will never develop cleaner and cheaper methods of nuclear power if we stop investing in nuclear energy.
We can invest in both.
Because money is never a factor in these situations, right? Just vote for the proper green candidate who can simply 'will' a solution into existence, yes?
£54Billion? Not great, not terrible.
you're in shock comrade
I heard £50 billion is spent on corrosion prevention in the UK every year so £54 billion for an entire project doesn't seem like much in that perspective.
GET THIS MAN TO THE INFIRMARY! HES DELUSIONAL
£16Billion more than the UK deffence budget, I'd say that's a fair bit!
@Phil Weatherley the project is almost complete, they are ready to start retrieving the waste. Only thing holding it back is the plant where it is going to be stored, due to Covod 19 there has been some delays.
Chanel 4 News: Sellafield is Europe's most radioactively contaminated site.
Chernobyl: Am I a joke to you?
Also only a 5% meltdown.
@@owlman4167 okay Jesus mad respect but not really, sure its not as contaminated as it used to be but there are places in Russia 200km away where levels are just as high as the middle of the exclusion zone due to rain 2 days after the incident, inside the reactor is still very radioactive and if one were to live in the exclusion zone and indeed those within 200kn receive dangerously high long term doses, there are many hot spots and contaminated objects as well as location that were not cleaned, so yes residential areas and roads are "okay" but forests and soil is very bad as well as the level of ionized particles which was very high until the new arch was fitted, so it is still very contaminated and would be more so had it not been for the sacrificial cleanup efforts
They said in the news article that it's multiple times more radioactive than Chernobyl
@@aabra6265 because of the differences in the fuel used at chernobyl and the stuff being stored at sellafield.
@Fred Yes it is.
2:19 he needs those glasses to stop his radioactive laser beam eyes killing the interviewer
No. Those are "the optimists" glasses...
Nightmare = “challenging technical piece of work we have to do”
@Look behind You He really looks like he recieved an overdose of radiation and the glasses make it even worse.
When you're cheap and don't cough up the money needed to process nuclear waste right from the beginning, you'll just end up with an even more expensive and dangerous mess later.
Tuppoo94 Processing nuclear waste is often dangerous and not economical considering how much cheaper it is to just buy more fuel. This is a problem of old storage techniques that aren't used anymore(at least not in the west). Nowadays it is stored in movable concrete capsules that are monitored constantly and can be moved and buried or further encased if any danger of leakage exists.
@@simonphoenix3789 not right, after reprocessing the storage is simplified, and the time required for storage is reduced. Yeah its an expense. but its worth it when you consider the results.
Nuclear Waste has been dumped into the British Channel And radioactive pollution has been introduced into our environment and food change.
Sellafield’s worst known accident was in November of 1983 when radioactive wastes escaped into the Irish sea. These wastes were produced during reprocessing. In other words, they WERE processing nuclear wastes they made.
@@douglasskaalrud6865you gorgot about the billions of barrels the Irish and Brits dumped in the British channel tons and tons of it
Sellafield aka Windscale dates originally from a time when no one gave a damn about nuclear safety and they just dumped things down old mine shafts or in the sea. There's supposed to be some tanks containing things dumped there that have no records of what they are.
Dumping things down old mine shafts is exactly what the recent proposal for new coal mines in Cumbria is all about; when the mines are exhausted, with shafts deep under the Irish Sea, the exhausted mines will be back-filled with nuclear waste.
You're spewing nonsense and lies. You can't just dump high level radioactive waste into the sea. You can't hide something like that. Someone somewhere would detect it.
The only attempts was made with throwing it into subduction zones of the tectonic plates, but that's stupid. That waste isn't a waste. It's precious material for the future industry.
@J S they dumped metal barrels into the sea until 1992 when it was banned. There's an extensive video about it on here. Some of the barrels rusted away, some are still intact.
@J S we might have stopped in the 80s but the international agreement was in 1992. Pipeline discharges from Sellafield and La Hague are still permitted though there are 2020 and 2030 targets for a reduction.
@J S sea discharges involve releasing low level waste directly into the sea. Sea dumping involves dumping barrels into the sea. They both involve disposing of waste into the sea. I'm saying that the end of barrel dumping was not the end of dumping waste into the sea.
The 11% nuclear levy on electricity bills has not been put aside for dealing with decommissioning costs and waste, but spent on building more nuclear power stations like Sizewell B. Economists estimate that the income from the levy between 1990-98 alone was over £9bn. The industry was privatised and the taxpayer robbed for over 50 billion pounds...
This statement give made is Fact 👍
And thank you mr. technician for patiently correcting aforementioned and very excitable mr. nightmare.....
I am here because of Kraftwerk's concert song "Radio-Activity" where they mentioned Sellafield. I had not heard of it before, and was curious. Thank you Kraftwerk for raising awareness of some upsetting truths.
It says something that Sellafield is trying to contain their waste so tightly. Natural Gas and Coal can pump it freely into the air for everyone to breathe every day. Maybe they should be subject to the same standards. Surely their bottom line wouldn't be impacted... would it?
nothing to compare here, gas to nuclear waste it is ridiculous @@Caiddenn
The original 1975 version of "Radio-Activity" didn't have the nuclear disaster sites' names in the lyrics, they added them for the 1991 remixed & rearranged version of the song, along with "Harrisburg", "Chernobyl", "Hiroshima" (recently swapped for "Fukushima").
Hello from Ireland. Thanks for giving us radioactive beaches and waterways on the east coast of the country. We appreciate your trash so much. Many thanks
Has the radiation killed as many people as the bombs you gave us?
Sorry on behalf of the majority here who never agreed to it and are getting the same problems down our west coast. Good old tories are after a new round of nuclear reactors despite not clearing up the mess from the first lot!
"Sellafield is planning on abandoning that contract... they say they've now found a simpler quicker way to clean up the mess" - hahaha I was almost expecting him to say "Ah, we're gonna dump it in the ocean"... but he didn't. :)
CraigDCrocodile They never come straight out and say things. Besides, he could reason, if it's good enough for Fukushima, it's good enough for us.
Superpureeliteful I always thought the Baltic Sea was even worse. I have read that Sellafield is partially to blame for that. Sweden is mostly to blame. People eat the fish caught in the Baltic Sea as if they don't know about it. I don't eat those fish or any fish from the Pacific. Probably the Atlantic is very radioactive too. No one is going to tell us otherwise.
@@Bevity I'm quite sure it is not Sweden nor Finland to blame for the radioactivity in the Baltic but the ussr and Poland. However that is not why you shouldn't eat fish from the Baltic sea that is mercury and other heavy metals that partly is there naturally and partly becourse the ussr didn't understand that the ocean don't just make things disappear however most ppl in the west thought the same up till the 70's
Kenneth Hermann I guess my point is... not exactly who is the biggest radioactive polluter of the Baltic Sea, but that there are SO MANY sources. I know about the mercury, dioxins, PCBs, etc. too. It is a small body of water that only has about 1% water exchange with other bodies of water, so all of this pollution just keeps building up. I went to Poland and ordered fish at a restaurant, forgetting where the fish came from. It was so good, and enormous portions. I remembered after, but it was only the once. Don't eat fish from the Baltic Sea!
J S Oh, well then. Everything is great. No problem at all then. Eat as many fish as you can. Pig out.
i can count on one hand the amount of times i have been to the visitors centre.. its 7
Haha.
steve culley ahh, you live close by then.
Does they water leave that refreshing tingle / burning sensation?
@@riverdeep399 Background radiation is STILL radiation. You are being irradiated right now. You'll probably survive it, because your body repairs radiation damage (mostly - read the small print).
The world is less radioactive now than it has ever been. If you understood what radiation was, you'd already know this. Life evolved under much heavier radioactivity.
The Irish Sea is fucking cold to swim in, and definitely makes one tingle.
@@riverdeep399 how did you come to that conclusion from a joke? guess much or just make it up? blithering idiot
Epic 👍🏼
Was he wearing rose tinted glasses? I was always told not to trust those people...
Vulcan GBR agreed! His teeth were gross too!
@Bunker Sieben they are known to help people with dyslexia.
I'm no expert, but i know that the eyes are a good spot for radiation to enter your body deeply. I guess he wants to avoid that...
Dude is so rolling in money.
I'm looking at the world through rose colored glasses
And everything is rosy now.
He basically said it's not a nightmare, it's a nightmare
Fire it all into space
"intolerable risk" 1:33 i feel uncomfortable living on the same island as this place
I feel uncomfortable living on the same planet 😭
I feel bad living in the same county as this place😖😖
intolerable is an industry term, its not "intolerable" in the human sense/definition of the term. it means that it needs to be replaced/repaired as soon as possible it doesnt mean that it is an immediate danger
I live within 10 miles of this place!
Frizocean331 cool?
Local seaweed long the river Wyre was found to be 1000 times the normal safe level of radation.
Any idiot with a Geiger counter can see it’s perfectly safe there. This man is delusional take him to the infirmary!
Don't eat the seaweed....problem solved.
It shocked me that Nuclear Waste consumes 95.8% of the Budget for Energy and Climate Change.
odd they dont really invest cash into research that might substantially reduce the amount of waste. odd because since the 1950s quite a lot of progress has been made in nuclear science. just look at france for instance. 90%+ nuclear and renewable. cleanest air in europe. trust the brits to hamfist the whole process. solid fuel nuclear reactors need to be made a thing of the past with improved technology.
It's because it's weapons waste, not standard commercial waste :/
In commercial waste, the radioactive stuff is kept trapped within the fuel & the cladding. So it's really not too hard to deal with.
But if you want to get to the juicy weapons plutonium that's also stuck in the fuel, you have to dissolve the cladding/fuel. Which of course releases the trapped radioactive elements and liquifies already nasty stuff, making it much harder to clean up. This is bad enough when they do a "good" job, let alone the absolute messes they made with early weapons programs.
(For an example of what I'm talking about, compare commercial "dry casks" to the barrels of liquid weapons waste at Hanford, WA)
1:26 What the heck was that shadow? It looked like some kind of weird STALKER event.
The Midnight Entity.
Ah it was just Herbert the six legged chicken
Winscale had a nuclear disaster in the 60s when the plant caugh fire spread radioactive material around cumbria and Ireland ranked 5 out of 7 in nuclear disaster scale Britain government covered it up until the 80s. Perently 2 times higher then the bombs on japan.
you can slag Sellafield off all you want but that won't deal with the issue and money should be no object!
we need to get this done properly safely and correctly no matter how much it costs we owe it to ourselves our children and Europe and the rest of the world to
FINALLY, Someone who understands why it needs to be done. A lot of people in these comments who don't understand the potential severity of the situation. Let's leave it and let it collapse, save our 54b and contaminate the Northern hemisphere.
Solar, Wind, Tidal and Dams surely have a massive place when the long term costs of nuclear are taken into account, Good luck to the good people at sellafield who are clearing stuff up, but surely we worked out that nuclear overall isn't worth it when the hidden extended costs involved are taken into account? maybe fusion can come along but we need a cleaner source of energy.
beingatliberty nuclear power creates 0 greenhouse gasses
@@thomashambly3718 Except from the massive amounts of GHGs from the cement used to make the power plant, the diesel burnt to mine the uranium, the cement used for waste storage etc. etc. it adds up, it is not zero.
@@uber1337hakz I said nuclear power, not power stations
By nuclear you mean light water reactors and not gen 4 molten salt reactors?
@@uber1337hakz How about the cost and damage to the earth to find the rare metals needed for solar panels? They move mountains to find indium, neodymium and others rare metals.
I live in a small town near here called Whitehaven, and my Granda works here. Best paying job in Cumbria I think.
how many Sievert are in the place you live ?
Other than tenant farming, Sellafield must be the next biggest employer in Cumbria...................and much better paid than farming
@@smitbar11 oh yeah, without Sellafield the entire county would shrivel up and die.
@@puporossi4888 dunno but I heard the readybrek man is from round here 😸
You did not see a leaking silo because it is not there
The building is not great, not terrible its equilvent to a chest x ray
This man is delusional, take him to the infirmary
Nick002 Im told the situation at Sellafield is completely under control, theyre are reports of only 3.6 roentgens
Actually it costs the tax-payer the same as about 40 X-rays, HS2 is more like 400 chest x-rays, and those Chinese building Hinckley point C are getting 4 million chest x-rays!
Look up a video from the 80's called "Britain's nuclear laundry" shows how bad the place really is and what it does.
yabadoo completely agree with you, if radiation was so dangerous, all airline pilots, and all people on the ISS should end up far worse than they do. They experience far more radiation than someone working at the sellafield plant would on a daily basis.
@@TheSkippyboy Radiation is incredibly dangerous, but that doesn't mean that sellafield isn't safe.
I spent a week there during work experience and got lots of amazing tours from a guy pretty high up and all I can legally say is that one of the storage sites is so fucked that it is literally a ticking time bomb
Marcus Reynolds Great. :/ and still they want more nuke plants.
It ain't to help with the energy crisis, that's for sure.
What god awful weapon are they constructing now...
I know people who work there. It’s not great but not in that way.
@@DSQueenie not a bomb but more a disaster waiting to happen in terms of nuclear waste leaking into the environment
"No leak before several years" from guy with a sweating red ionizing face
Heated uranium and hydrogen leaking 😂 I think sellafield is lucky the damn thing hasn't blown up.
or we just know how to properly manage radioactive material.
Ashley Goggs yeah just dump it into the Irish Sea.
Not very profitable, unless it covers their weapons program as well.
Matthew Suffidy that's why it was built.
Must also be the only reason they are bothering with it.
You're right.
Revival.
The earnings are made and saved, as the tax payer will pay for solving the problems.
as well indeed
The reason it's a mess, is that they rushed atomic weapons in the 50s without any thought of how to clean it all up in later years.
This is a widely acknowledged fact. Completely indisputable. The guys involved in the weapons program would probably happily confirm that too,
Along the south east coast of Ireland theirs an unusually high rate of birth defects, children born with cancers ect. It's a hot spot for cancer in Ireland actually. I recall an effort by the Irish public back in the 90s to highlight the dangers of sellafield which involved flooding government ministers offices with pictures of deformed children. Polliticians looked the other way of course.
and they still will.
it all makes perfect sense when looked at in pounds shillings and pence.
no radiation was released for gods sake radiation came over the uk in the 80s beacuse of chernoble
In terms of radiation, the plant director reports no more than 3.6 roentgen. I‘m told its the equivalent of a chest x-ray.
So if you are overdue for a check up you can go there
Not great, not terrible😀
But nobody gets a best X-ray everyday.
how many solar panels can you get for 54 billion? 🤔
Not much.
solar panel doesn’t help much when it is only panel 😎
Irrelevent, since this a legacy site of the UK nuclear weapons programme, and needs to be cleaned up properly whatever the financial cost.
4:30 Pfft, corrosion prevention costs 50 billion *every year* in the UK.
I always use that value as a rule of thumb.
so... 2billions euro to get the job done, 48b for greasing that fat bureaucratic British machine
yup! it's all there, no mistakes...
it would've cost 3billions to get it done thank god with the bureaucracy in place we saved 1b..
it's about how much senses there is to it....
Ah yes, the ol' way of removing a lid from radioactive waste... Poke it with a stick
Building a new storage building for the other storage building
yes! that's science!!
now all they have to do is to push on the next two generation so they find a solution
5:10 the death star has landed!
What country is Sellafield in?
Cumbria.
What country is Cumbria in?
England.
Thanks for the info Rayn!
I love how the cleanup is sponsored by a Limited Company :D
1:36 the noises in the background are really nice
Costs are what they are. First time is always the most expensive one. To figure out how to do everything is always going to cost money.
what could possibly go wrong???
0:45 radioactive pigeons
Those are very clearly Jackdaws...
Electricity so cheap you won't even get a bill they said then after spending billions to clean it they say solar and wind are too expensive
Renewable is less expensive and dangerous. Just facts
Solar and wind energy is a joke.
Only coal or nuclear is an existing solution today. Maybe within 10 years nuclear fusion.
That is the reality
@@shootermcgavin4559 but doesn't generate what industry even needs to produce the materiels to make them.
This had nothing to do with electricity. It was the result of the weapons program during the cold War. Past generations were careless with producing the plutonium, so current generations are tasked with cleaning it up. You think 54 billion is a lot, let's just abandon it, see what happens when the most dangerous building in Europe collapses.
I really just wanted to shout "sunk cost fallacy" at the presenter of the video every time he asked a question >_
is that Scottish ??
They did improve their "all clear' metronome 'bing bong' noise. Much less annoying.
It almost sounds nice
tell me how nuclear is cheap and safe again?
It's safe
M€ because a greedy baby boomer tells us so.
Nothing says safe like crumbling open air ponds and buildings with no records of what's in them full of hazardous waste that they used to dump into the sea.
3.6 roentgen. not great, not terrible
It probably is 3.6 roentgen.
If thorium reactors become a thing, that would make storage problems a thing of the past, or as I understand.
Wrong. Thorium reactors produce uranium 232 which is highly radioactive, so much so that humans can not handle it as in get anywhere near it. Only with remote control and video can you manipulate U232.
The leak from the old containment building is about 3.6 Roentgen per hour, not great but not horrifying. I'm told it's the equivalent of a chest x-ray.
Hanford makes this look like childs play.
@Amed Tajan yes they have a tour of one of the reactors and a museum.
54 billion and they are chipping away at a lid with a metal rod? Wtf looks like total sh*t.
Just stick the waste in 55 galon steel barrels and dump it in the North Sea. Simple and time tested method used by almost everybody with practicaly everything in the past. Or send it to India.
This is why nuclear power shouldn’t be used. The building is falling apart.
Try putting money into the nhs and finding good dr’s in the AnE departments at Penrith and Carlise and consultants along with Birbeck medical group.
All about money again and people who try to convince us they have this under control.
My dad works here
same
How many fingers you got?
Is he the old geezer chipping away at the containment lid while his nuts are in the way?
Why don’t you Brits get all those doctors and engineers that have been flooding into your country to work on the problem?
Seriously? That’s the UK and the guys are worried about the costs? Not safety nor the expediency with which decommissioning is done?
It's more important to be safe and clean than about the money
it started when it was called Windscale. They classed filters in the chimney as a folly but it helped when they cut fins on the uranium shuttles to speed up plutonium harvesting. It caused the reactor to catch fire and those filters saved a lot of pollution. Now they want a deep storage at Theddlethorpe for high level waste, knowing funds are tight we fear the worst here.
Free energy ... They said ...
Toopy Anne Binoo better than coal. They just did it “wrong” in this case
The FBI Ummm... No?
It was never _for_ public consumption.
It was to build weapons of *"Mass destruction"* ... to impress the US.
@Epic erm actually i think he knows plenty !
@@mindoza44 As far as the bomb was concerned, anything the Yanks did the Brits had to do as well…..well not so well, but they got there in the end.....now to get out.
people blame nuclear power for sellafield but almost all the high grade nuclear waste is from nuclear weapons. ditch trident, keep nuclear power it's clean, safe (the safest of any power generation) and it doesn't spew toxic waste into the environment like lithium batteries, solar panel manufacture or coal
Site with buildings and pools of radioactive waste requiring a 100 year cleanup = good. Solar panels = bad.
You're just as ignorant as people who think coal and oil are cleaner than solar.
@@danem2215 when did I say solar bad? All I did was try to point out that people like you who think that nuclear forms "pools" (seriously 😂 sad) and who think there's no waste or deaths from solar are pathetic children who don't care about the planet and only about their own egos
So far there is a far bigger ticking time bomb in France at lest we admitt to the problem (even if the waste is being dumped secretly in a so called coal mine on anglesey ) they dont think they have a problem , but all their nuclear stations are coming to the end of their lives and radiation does not respect borders (Chernobyl )
You're lying and you're an ignorant.
Thats why they decommission the reactors once they are no longer being used.
Looking after the 140 tonnes stockpile of Plutonium at Sellafield is presently costing the UK Government £73 million per year.
Legacy off the worst nuclear accident until chernodyll. This is the waste left over from the accident. Famous last words. Dont worry it safe, we have learnt from our last failures.
multiple myeloma? The stats from the lake district are a bit higher than from the rest of theworld. Check it out?
Milking government funds knowing they have authority over a barrel and can dictate costs, this then secures massive profits. They will probably get the job done but not until the maximum amount of money has been extorted from the taxpayer. Another example of not being able to control costs and the contractor will never admit that they, the contractor don't really care. It's always about profit.
Adrian Simper at 2:27 viewing the world thru rose tinted glasses, classic.
Sellafield "limited" takings tonnes of cash, just to change plan, in several years they'll do the same and say it will take even more money and even more time.
Can't trust businesses to do a fast job if they're given bigger hand outs for doing a slow job.
This is scary - i think they have no idea how to handle all this deadly nuclear waste.
Judging by the old man using a crowbar on the lid on the nuclear waste container at 5:02 I think your right
Latest idea is to stick the waste into exhausted coal mines; building coal mines close to Sellafield site has just been approved for "coking coal" for steel production.
@@tommorris3688 By the time it becomes a real health hazard on a day to day basis you and anyone yet to be born will all be dead from old age so never mind the cost enjoy the "free" energy production while they are still allowed to do it. BTW, did you know that low level radiation over a prolonged period is the cheapest form of birth control and you don't have to take any pills to achieve 100% success? it's Nature's answer to the over population problem and also biodiversity.
Nuclear costs far more than it will ever make, ridiculous.
I have seen it first on NDA's video on how Sweden deals with radioactive waste.
The british and their ego... bigger and complex than chernobyl, more fuel, most costly...and at the end nothing its done
Disastrous. We shouldn’t be using a technology which creates waste that’s dangerous for millions of years that we have no idea how to store...!
I know we need nuclear alongside green energy, but what could 54 BILLION have been spent on with regards to clean energy ? Tidal barrages, more wind turbines, subsidies for the installation of solar panels ?
Why do we not use the undergound facilities built in English mines to store radioactive waste, they are very secure and built with various layers of concrete and protection to seal it off from leakage for 2000 years
Put nuclear waste in boxes in a storage building...yeahhh what if someone will bomb it. Shouldn't this be top secret?
Tony_Fcking_Montana we're over run with them.
Just waiting until they realise.
This is thanks to Baby Boomer greed. They shafted their children. What a legacy.
yeah so how would someone bomb it?
The buildings and boxes are heavily fortified. Sellafield is a no fly zone, try and get even a drone over the perimeter and see what happens to it.
Call it what it is, windscale
No problem, till things turn bad we are all dead anyway.
Well at least an enemy knows wheres to sink a nuke.
if they sank a nuke there they would potentially harm themselves. When the 1 reactor melted down in chernobyl the whole world detected radiation after a few days. Imagine what would happen if a nuke spewed thousands of tons of nuclear waste into the atmosphere. It would be like a slow burning mutually assured destruction .
I doubt a nuclear bomb on top of nuclear waste dump would make any difference to the damage caused.
@@snowflakemelter1172 it would kick it up into the atmosphere. Bombs are notorious for spreading radiation so dropping one on waste would likely enhance the amount of radiation being spread.
Let's just spend a few million pounds thinking about a plan to spend more money and try to pull more money for this problem that just won't go away.
“Europe’s most radioactively contaminated site”? Really? Think about that statement. Is Ukraine not in Europe?
There's more radioactive material at Sellafield than Chernobyl.
I guess it depends how you define "contaminated".
it's true, that's what's so terrifying about it
Personnel bullied for raising health and safety concerns ???? We need to find out the management who behaved in this manor, instenous dismissals followed by prosicution.
And a spelling contest too!
needs more LEAD
@Bunker Sieben Yes, putted shortly lead is the stable form of Uranium.
And that's why it is so good at stopping radiation, beta and gamma rays in particular : it remains very dense, and full of electrons.
This place is safe. I don't live too far away. I don't really care
Christian Moss little do you know
Take some soil samples around, get your vacuum dust sampled. It will probably contain a higher than acceptable traces of plutonium. That depends on how far you are from that area. But if you live within 15 miles of sellafield, I would consider moving.
@@EinkOLED the vacuum dust wont contain any plutonium... having radiation itself doesn't mean there is plutonium nearby.
but yeah he should definitely get a Geiger counter. it should just be safe background radiation. not necessarily alpha/beta waves from the nuclear site.
i can pick up a random rock from the middle of nowhere and it should be slightly radioactive.
@@darkshadowsx5949 Swear alpha can't travel very far.
Decommissioning? Pump into Irish sea....to depopulate...based upon oceanic currents. That's the truth.
Apparently it’s only 3.6 roentgen
3.6, not great not terrible.
Equivalence to 1 million chest Xrays
Super deadly nuclear waste directly below my feet? Better poke at the lid with a stick!
I think they have no idea about how to treat it, and those cost estimates are insane.
Are you joking right ? Oh look lets use machines that might create sparks ..... and we all go boom.
@@amandacary6812 As the actress said to the Bishop....if you've never done it before, just poke it like you would with a stick.
its waste stored in water so theres no real threat unless you touch the water
@@ExoVyper what about the hydrogen gas generated?
reveals a major scheme in development
there are 450 operational nuclear power plants worldwide. and they still haven’t figured out what to do with the radioactive waste.
4:58 I see 1 man working though he may was well be asleep and 3 others watching.
Send it to Finland , ounkula will have it!
Never saw so many people smiling about what burying an unsolvable problem.
Honestly you need to see some of the clowns that work at sellafield.Half or more are not qualified and only get the jobs because of family and friends.Really clicky place to work and mark my words this place will get uncovered very soon.Ask anyone who works there what they do and the response you normally get is not much we just sit watching TV on our phones now that's worrying.Totty towers as it's known is another issue the bosses can't and won't deal with.Its all about the money.A ticking timebomb ready to go boom.
Nice story mark
Nuclear power is all too much trouble
No it isn't, the public just dislike it because of Chernobyl and fukushima
And Windscale and Sellafield and Okiluoto and Three Mile Island and Gorloben and Monju and...
@@dottorb7054 sellafield was windscale
But nuclear power is carbon free. Nothing spells trouble like carbon emissions.
the Windscale piles were never meant to produce power. they were designed to create plutonium for nuclear weapons.
And now it's Britain's most contaminated site! Thanks to brexit isn't a european problem anymore. Thanks UK, you're awesome!
EU
Britain will still be in europe. We aren't geographically moving.
That works both ways as the EU has 130 reactors that we are no longer responsible for.
@@tom360063 unfortunately, you aren't
Found this from Kraftwerk.
Oh nuclear power is so clean.....
But nuclear waste can never be cleaned up, and it costs more and more to store it forever.
That's just bad design though, seems pretty logical that you create a storage solution that makes sure that you can easily transfer waste in the future.
We should just start building thorium reactors though.
The latest development is that the new coal mines that are proposed for Cumbria, with mine shafts just a few kilometres from Sellafield, is that the coal mines, when exhausted and empty of coal, will be used to store fragments of nuclear waste cast into cement (for example Silicon Carbide matrix cement). There is a lot of nuclear hardware to dispose of: Calder Hall (Windscale) nuclear reactor parts, THORP reprocessing apparatus parts, nuclear reactors from defunct Trident submarines, advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGR's) that will soon be decommissioned, a MAGNOX reactor that will soon be decommissioned, as well as pits of nuclear slurry at Sellafield that are rusting and rotting away. Digging coal in Cumbria is just a "smoke screen" to hide what is going on with creating an underground nuclear waste dump. The mining company involved is based in the Cayman Islands so will not be paying tax to the UK Government and probably cannot be sued if anything goes wrong when storing nuclear waste in the exhausted coal mines. The shafts of the proposed mines will extend deep under the Irish Sea. If the aforementioned cement encapsulation fails, the de facto nuclear dump provided by the exhausted coal mines will pollute the whole of the Irish East coast and the Scottish West coast. Because no other councils are prepared to accept high level nuclear waste in mainland UK, and Northern Ireland has also rejected becoming a nuclear waste dump, the UK Government is now (via the proposed coal mines) hoisting an underground nuclear waste dump on Cumbria. Moreover, the Cumbria Council unanimously accepted the situation at a recent meeting when the issue of approving the coal mines was voted upon. The fact that the coal mines will eventually become a nuclear waste dump (referred to as a "repository") is the "big ghost" in the cupboard that everybody in the Cumbria council knows about, but nobody dares speak openly about. i submit that open discussion is urgently required so that, if the coal mines are to be used as a nuclear repository, that the job should be done properly and thoroughly, and not in an amateur half-done "cowboy" manner that is so typical of infrastructure projects in the United Kingdom.
*Tim Norris*
"if the coal mines are to be used as a nuclear repository" - unlikely with Gen4 molten salt reactors.
@@tonyduncan9852 - Gen4 molten salt reactors are years away, if ever. There are very many hurdles that must be overcome before they are accepted for use. Moreover, there are competing technologies such as X-energy pebble bed reactors that can also be made to function with Thorium pebbles, and are a favoured reactor type by US military.
@@tommorris3688 "Gen4 molten salt reactors are years away, if ever" - I don't think so. The first was commissioned in the mid-sixties.
"There are very many hurdles that must be overcome before they are accepted for use" - It depends on whether one wishes to consume ALL possible materials, or instead go for a simple system without graphite moderation which could run for several decades before decommissioning.
"competing technologies such as X-energy pebble bed reactors" - These aren't simple or cheap, or even long-lived.
"favoured reactor type by US military" - that's no recommendation.
@@tonyduncan9852 - Some factual errors in your missive. Thorium LFTR will not appear any time soon. Dr Alvin Weinberg's reactor was a very primitive test setup. A commercial design of Thorium LFTR is a totally different undertaking. People like Dr Kirk Sorensen have never built or operated a Thorium LFTR, so do not be beguiled by his overenthusiastic TH-cam videos. I have found him wrong technically on several issues. Many people describe him as an over-enthusiastic "zealot", that is very dangerous when the audience is ill-informed and beguiled by emotion.
@@tommorris3688 "Some factual errors - Dr Alvin Weinberg's reactor was a very primitive test setup" - Primitive it certainly was - but it was still a MSR.
"A commercial design of Thorium LFTR is a totally different undertaking" - I agree. It should be made as a centre of excellence first. But I prefer the simple MSR because it is known technology.
"Kirk Sorensen has never built or operated a Thorium LFTR" - but he is an ex-NASA engineer with a good record.
"do not be beguiled" - I'm not.
"I have found him wrong technically on several issues" - I wonder how.
"very dangerous" - so is fire.
Ahem. Chernobyl is in Europe. And yes, it is more radioactively contaminated, no matter how you look at it. :-D
I don't doubt this could be #2, though. Although old USSR has several more contenders, but they might not be in Europe.
Who pays the regulator?
Stuart Smith we the tax bitches do. Ask who diverts the funds... ask what weapon they are cooking up next..
Notice all these sites are well away from London,the politicians are safe.