Wales can object to Hinkley Point C because they were not adequately consulted. All and everyone who can should object to HP3.
I encourage any and everyone and anyone with a legitimate objection to Hinley Point C to pursue that objection.
I encourage any and everyone and anyone with a legitimate objection to Hinley Point C to pursue that objection.
I got the impression that the people supposedly in charge were far too relaxed and too fast to excuse anything and everything, that the people in charge of Sellafield were not taking it all seriously.
Isn’t that the impression you got? Oh radioactive half life of Plutonium Pu-239 of 24,100 years. We’ll just put it in this pond here, forget and ignore it and let seagulls
I got the impression that they had no idea about anything – that they were totally inept. they were treating it like it was nothing. Oh yes, no need to worry that we have got this serious radioactive waste which we have ignored for the past 60 years. There’s no need to worry about that we put it in water in these concrete ponds that are falling to bits.
ed: Sellafield is a nuclear waste shithole
ed:
Sellafield needs urgent inspections. Please get in there urgently. International, EU inspectors?
ed: I intend to do an article on the Radioactive Pollution of Irish Sea which is largely due to Sellafield.
16/9/16: it has been announced that Theresa May’s Conservative government are going for Sellafield C in partnership with EDF and China.
I intend to further investigate and publish on Sellafield’s irrsponsible and fantastically negligent actions of pollution of the Irish Sea and their ridiculous shite pools.
Sellafield – originally called Windscale but the name was changed as a PR stunt after the 1957 Windscale fire – was built initially as a plant producing plutonium to build the UK’s first nuclear bombs. Political pressures dictated that the plutonium was produced quickly … so that the UK would have nuclear bombs sooner. Everything was secondary to producing the plutonium quickly. There’s also the issue that there was very little experience or expertise in running nuclear reactors – it had only been done in the States at that time. UK and USSR were desperate to catch up.
The Sellafield site is a huge sprawling mess of past endeavours. It is now a nuclear shitehole having accumulated foreign as well as UK’s nuclear waste extremely poorly stored and mismanaged. Sellafield is a filthy nuclear waste site that dumps thousands of litres of radioactive waste into the Irish Sea daily.
Central to Sellafield’s crap storage of nuclear waste are vast open-air storage ponds 5 or 6 metres deep. There is nothing high-tech about these ponds – they are simply rotting concrete ponds dating from the 50s containing water and highly radioactive waste open to the elements. There are accounts of flocks of seagulls, sparrows and other birds spreading this radioactivity since there is no way of preventing them.
Since Sellafield’s workers sign the Official Secrets Act, we rely on whistle-blowers for inside information. A whistle-blower leaked photos of the shocking ponds to the Ecologist magazine in 2014. [These photos are actually taken from the Guardian].
The Ecologist says
The images … from an anonymous source, show the state of spent nuclear fuel storage ponds that were commissioned in 1952, and used until the mid-1970’s as short term storage for spent fuel until it could be re-processed, producing plutonium for military use. However they were completely abandoned in the mid-1970s and have been left derelict for almost 40 years.
NOTE: The full set of original leaked photos is now placed in the public domain, available here.
The photographs show cracked concrete tanks holding water contaminated with high levels of radiation, seagulls bathing on the water, broken equipment, a dangerous mess of discarded items on elevated walkways, and weeds growing around the tanks.
The fuel storage ponds, the largest measuring 20m wide, 150m long and 6m deep, are now completely packed with spent fuel in disastrously poor condition.
If the ponds drain, the spent fuel may spontaneously ignite
The ponds are now undergoing decommissioning in order to restore them to safe condition. But the process is fraught with danger – and nuclear expert John Large warns that massive and uncontrolled radioactive releases to the environment could occur.
“This pond is build above ground”, he said. “It’s like an concrete dock full of water. But the concrete is in dreadful condition, degraded and fractured, and if the ponds drain, the Magnox fuel will ignite and that would lead to a massive release of radioactive material.
“Looking at the photos I am very disturbed at the degraded and run down condition of the structures and support services. In my opinion there is a significant risk that the system could fail.”
“If you got a breach of the wall by accident or by terrorist attack, the Magnox fuel would burn. I would say there’s many hundreds of tonnes in there. It could give rise to a very big radioactive release. It’s not for me to make comparisons with Chernobyl or Fukushima, but it could certainly cause serious contamination over a wide area and for a very long time.”
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New Scientist: Shocking state of world’s riskiest nuclear waste site
URGENT clean-up of two of the world’s most dangerous radioactive waste stores will be delayed by at least five years, despite growing safety fears.
The waste is stored at the UK’s Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site, which holds radioactive waste dating back to the dawn of the nuclear age. An accident at the derelict site could release radioactive materials into the air over the UK and beyond.
Last week, the UK government sacked the private consortium running the £80-billion-programme to clean up Sellafield, and gave the job back to its own agency, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). The clean-up operation, scheduled to end by 2120, costs the government £1.9 billion a year.
The private consortium, Nuclear Management Partners, was meant to “bring in world-class expertise” and allow the government to “get to grips with the legacy after decades of inaction”, according to a 2008 statement by Mike O’Brien, energy minister at the time. But six years on, the privatisation experiment has been abandoned.
The surprise renationalisation comes after delays at two of the four waste stores prioritised for clean-up. The four ponds and silos contain hundreds of tonnes of highly radioactive material from more than 60 years of operations. The decaying structures are cracking, leaking waste into the soil, and are at risk of explosions from gases created by corrosion.
…
I intend to bring a series about filthy nuclear soon.
It seems that the real issue is and always has been nuclear waste.
I am very disappointed by so-called pro-nuclear environmentalists e.g. Monbiot. I sincerely hope that they reconsider their positions/perspectives. I find it very strange that such people are so concerned by farmyard shit pollution of streams while being indifferent to plutonium shit pollution of the Irish Sea.
I’ve been researching this lately. It is clear the Windscale / Sellafield is a total nuclear shithhole. They have vast open-air radioactive ponds there. Pigeons and seagulls have landed in these serious radioactive ponds to spread radioactivity far and wide.
The Windscale Fire in 1957 was hugely covered up. Radioactivity spread to South-East England and to Europe while Windscale workers were told to work as normal and not tell anyone. UK children have plutonium in their teeth, more according to how close to Sellafield they are. UK authorities have succeeded in conspiring that their childhood leukaemias are not caused by Windscale/Sellafield.
Ridiculous unnecessary transport is a huge contributor to climate change.
Commuting by jet planes is causing climate change. Get a job closer to home you US climate vandals.