Sellafield

Green Group Sounds Alarm Over Meta’s Nuclear Power Plans

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This article was originally posted 6/12/24 but was deleted probably by mistake.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, testifies before a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on January 31, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“In the blind sprint to win on AI, Meta and the other tech giants have lost their way,” said a leader at Environment America.

Environmental advocates this week responded with concern to Meta looking for nuclear power developers to help the tech giant add 1-4 gigawatts of generation capacity in the United States starting in the early 2030s.

Meta—the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and more—released a request for proposals to identify developers, citing its artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and sustainability objectives. It is “seeking developers with strong community engagement, development, …permitting, and execution expertise that have development opportunities for new nuclear energy resources—either small modular reactors (SMR) or larger nuclear reactors.”

The company isn’t alone. As TechCrunch reported: “Microsoft is hoping to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island by 2028. Google is betting that SMR technology can help it deliver on its AI and sustainability goals, signing a deal with startup Kairos Power for 500 megawatts of electricity. Amazon has thrown its weight behind SMR startup X-Energy, investing in the company and inking two development agreements for around 300 megawatts of generating capacity.”

In response to Meta’s announcement, Johanna Neumann, Environment America Research & Policy Center’s senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy, said: “The long history of overhyped nuclear promises reveals that nuclear energy is expensive and slow to build all while still being inherently dangerous. America already has 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste that we don’t have a storage solution for.”

“Do we really want to create more radioactive waste to power the often dubious and questionable uses of AI?” Neumann asked. “In the blind sprint to win on AI, Meta and the other tech giants have lost their way. Big Tech should recommit to solutions that not only work but pose less risk to our environment and health.”

“Data centers should be as energy and water efficient as possible and powered solely with new renewable energy,” she added. “Without those guardrails, the tech industry’s insatiable thirst for energy risks derailing America’s efforts to get off polluting forms of power, including nuclear.”

In a May study, the Electric Power Research Institute found that “data centers could consume up to 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030—more than double the amount currently used.” The group noted that “AI queries require approximately 10 times the electricity of traditional internet searches and the generation of original music, photos, and videos requires much more.”

Meta is aiming to get the process started quickly: The intake form is due by January 3 and initial proposals are due February 7. It comes after a rare bee species thwarted Meta’s plans to build a data center powered by an existing nuclear plant.

Following the nuclear announcement, Meta and renewable energy firm Invenergy on Thursday announced a deal for 760 megawatts of solar power capacity. Operations for that four-state project are expected to begin no later than 2027.

Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingGreen Group Sounds Alarm Over Meta’s Nuclear Power Plans

Sellafield cleanup cost rises to £136bn amid tensions with Treasury

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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/23/sellafield-cleanup-cost-136bn-national-audit-office

Sellafield has ‘retrieved much less waste than it had planned’ since 2020, the NAO said. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

National Audit Office questions value for money as predicted bill for decommissioning increases by £21bn

The cost of cleaning up Sellafield is expected to spiral to £136bn and Europe’s biggest nuclear waste dump cannot show how it offers taxpayers value for money, the public spending watchdog has said.

Projects to fix buildings containing hazardous and radioactive material at the state-owned site on the Cumbrian coast are running years late and over budget. Sellafield’s spending is so vast – with costs of more than £2.7bn a year – that it is causing tension with the Treasury, the report from the National Audit Office (NAO) suggests.

Officials from finance ministry told the NAO it was “not always clear” how Sellafield made decisions, the report reveals. Criticisms of its costs and processes come as the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, prepares to plug a hole of about £40bn in her maiden budget.

Europe’s most hazardous industrial site has previously been described by a former UK secretary of state as a “bottomless pit of hell, money and despair”. The Guardian’s Nuclear Leaks investigation in late 2023 revealed a string of cybersecurity problems at the site, as well as issues with its safety and workplace culture.

The NAO found that Sellafield was making slower-than-hoped progress on making the site safe and that three of its most hazardous storage sites pose an “intolerable risk”.

The site is a sprawling collection of buildings, many never designed to hold nuclear waste long-term, now in various states of disrepair. It stores and treats decades of nuclear waste from atomic power generation and weapons programmes, has taken waste from countries including Italy and Sweden, and is the world’s largest store of plutonium.

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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/23/sellafield-cleanup-cost-136bn-national-audit-office

The shocking state of the Sellafield nuclear shitehole

Continue ReadingSellafield cleanup cost rises to £136bn amid tensions with Treasury

Sellafield nuclear site hacked

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A seabird staying warm in one of Sellafield nuclear dump’s open-air ponds.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-nuclear-site-hacked-groups-russia-china

The UK’s most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has been hacked into by cyber groups … the Guardian can reveal.

The astonishing disclosure and its potential effects have been consistently covered up by senior staff at the vast nuclear waste and decommissioning site, the investigation has found.

The Guardian has discovered that the authorities do not know exactly when the IT systems were first compromised. But sources said breaches were first detected as far back as 2015, when experts realised sleeper malware – software that can lurk and be used to spy or attack systems – had been embedded in Sellafield’s computer networks.

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The full extent of any data loss and any ongoing risks to systems was made harder to quantify by Sellafield’s failure to alert nuclear regulators for several years, sources said.

The revelations have emerged in Nuclear Leaks, a year-long Guardian investigation into cyber hacking, radioactive contamination and toxic workplace culture at Sellafield.

The site has the largest store of plutonium on the planet and is a sprawling rubbish dump for nuclear waste from weapons programmes and decades of atomic power generation.

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In one highly embarrassing incident last July, login details and passwords for secure IT systems were inadvertently broadcast on national TV by the BBC One nature series Countryfile, after crews were invited into the secure site for a piece on rural communities and the nuclear industry.

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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-nuclear-site-hacked-groups-russia-china

Shitty open-air pond at Sellafield nuclear waste dump containing spent nuclear fuel rods. Notice the seabird staying warm.

https://onaquietday.org/search/Sellafield/

Sellafield: ‘bottomless pit of hell, money and despair’ at Europe’s most toxic nuclear site

Continue ReadingSellafield nuclear site hacked

The Nonsense of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing

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Dr. Ian Fairlie

The Nonsense of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing

Many readers will have seen the interesting Panorama programme on the poor safety
record at Sellafield broadcast on BBC 1 on September 5
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07v80s4/panorama-sellafields-nuclear-safety-
The BBC press release stated this was a “special investigation into the shocking state of
Britain’s most hazardous nuclear plant…” and it certainly was. Perhaps the most important
of several whistleblower revelations was that the previous US managers had been shocked
at the state of the plant when they took over its running in 2008.
Although the programme producers are to be congratulated for tackling the subject, it was
only 30 minutes long and tells only a small part of the whole sorry story.
This article tries to give more background information, and importantly, more analysis and
explanation. The full story would require several books and would be painful reading.

What is reprocessing?

Reprocessing is the name given to the physico-chemical treatment of spent nuclear fuel
carried on at Sellafield in Cumbria since the 1950s. This involves the stripping of metal
cladding from spent nuclear fuel assemblies, dissolving the inner uranium fuel in boiling
concentrated nitric acid, chemically separating out the uranium and plutonium isotopes and
storing the remaining dissolved fission products in large storage tanks.
It is a dirty, dangerous, unhealthy, polluting, expensive process which results high radiation
doses to the ~9,000 workers employed at Sellafield.

Environmental consequences

The Sellafield plant is host to several hundred radioactive waste streams and processes
which result in large discharges of radioactive liquids to sea and emissions of radioactive
gases and aerosols to the atmosphere. Raised levels of childhood leukemias in some villages
nearby are considered to be linked to the inhalation and ingestion of these radionuclides.
Sellafield, and a similar plant in La Hague France, continue to be, by some margin, the
largest sources of radioactive pollution in the world. For example, the Irish Sea is the most
radioactively polluted sea in the world with about half a tonne of plutonium sitting on its
seabed from reprocessing.
The collective doses to the world’s population from the long-lived gaseous nuclides C-14,
and I-129, and from medium-lived Kr-85 and H-3 (tritium) emitted at Sellafield are huge and
are estimated by radiation biologists to cause tens of thousands of early deaths throughout
the world.
Another result is the 140 tonnes of unneeded, highly radiotoxic, plutonium (Pu) stored on
site at a cost of £50 million a year. Pu is fissile and, in the wrong hands, this amount could
be made into ~20,000 warheads, ie it is a serious nuclear proliferation danger.

The Liquid Waste Tanks

Shitty open-air pond at Sellafield nuclear waste dump containing spent nuclear fuel rods.
Shitty open-air pond at Sellafield nuclear waste dump containing spent nuclear fuel rods.

Not discussed in the BBC programme, but perhaps most serious of all, are the ~20 large
holding tanks at Sellafield containing thousands of litres of extremely radiotoxic fission
products, including long-lived Cs-137and Sr-90. Discussing these tanks, the previous
management consortium Nuclear Management Partners stated in 2012 “there is a mass of
very hazardous (nuclear) waste onsite in storage conditions that are extraordinarily
vulnerable, and in facilities that are well past their designated life”.
The National Audit Office (NAO) stated these tanks pose “significant risks to people and the
environment”. One official review concluded that, at worst, an explosive release from the
tanks could kill two million Britons and require the evacuation of an area reaching from
Glasgow to Liverpool. These dangerous tanks have also been the subject of complaints from
Ireland and Norway who fear their countries could be contaminated if explosions or fires
were to occur.

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Let’s not mince words, the practice of reprocessing at Sellafield has been and remains a
monumental national disgrace.
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Another seabird in one of Sellafield nuclear dump's open-air ponds.
Another seabird in one of Sellafield nuclear dump’s open-air ponds.

The shocking state of the Sellafield nuclear shitehole

Continue ReadingThe Nonsense of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing

Wales can object to Hinkley Point C because they were not adequately consulted. All and everyone who can should object to HP3.

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I encourage any and everyone and anyone with a legitimate objection to Hinley Point C to pursue that objection.

Continue ReadingWales can object to Hinkley Point C because they were not adequately consulted. All and everyone who can should object to HP3.