Inside Sellafield's death zone with the nuclear clean-up robots
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I feel like the Greenpeace position is anachronistic and still on the wrong side of common sense. They might have missed an opportunity to slow climate change. We've had nuclear generation for 64 years now and harm to the environment is minimal. Three major (to us) accidents and a bunch of lesser material releases have had minimal impact to the earth in the big scheme of things.
Of far greater harm is our extraction and burning of fossil. The California methane leak, all of the various oil spills, and now shale drilling all have substantial, long term harm we can measure in the climate and the local ecologies.
Obviously we'd prefer greener power if possible, but nuclear power appears by far the lesser evil than all the fossil activity.
35 years ago, I was a pretty ardent and sometimes locally active environmentalist, primarily in and around the high mountains of California. And, of course, a member of Greenpeace.
Once the true threat of CO2 and friends became apparent to me, I started raising hell about it at local meetings. Pollution does not matter if global average temperature goes up many degrees F.
So because of their inability to have a wider, more global outlook, I parted ways with Greenpeace around 1990.
I don't dislike the organization, for the most part. But they've been unable to focus on the big picture threats.
This is understandable; it's relatively easy to be passionate about the things Greenpeace is into. Things you can 'touch' and directly see. Had they, as an organization, tried to switch their focus to climate change, they'd probably have lost most of their internal energy.
The whole thing turned into a self-perpetuating funding circus with relatively little real world impact.
The problem was that they were going on and on about what things looked like and exaggerating the risks rather than to look carefully at what alternatives we had.
NL is kind of special in that way I guess, people here really care a lot about keeping things traditional. It brings in the tourists and of course it is lovely to see the country through a lens like that.
And those pesky windmills and solar panels were going to change all that. So we saw a lot of resistance. In the end they went so far as to determine that any sea based windmill parks had to be an x number of miles off-shore (in much deeper water, increasing construction costs considerably) rather than nearby.
Anyway, it's all moot, they came around and since then it has been good to see them fix things (the Green party also came to their senses at some point, but there are still hold-outs that would love to see all the windmills go away because they are eye sores - or at least, in the eyes of some, I think they are beautiful).
It is interesting to what extent history has been edited, good luck finding much about horizon pollution, bird strike studies or the effect of all those dark solar panels on our traditionally red brick roofs today.
What is also interesting is that we have a huge windmill tradition here, simply because without windmills a lot of the land here would have never been developed (if it even existed) in the first place. So this is the last place in the world where I would expect any kind of headwind (pun intended) for renewable energy. I guess in a hundred years when we have cheap fusion there will be a political party or lobby group trying hard to keep those windmills that are so beautiful.
The amount of noise around 'horizonvervuiling' (horizon pollution, I'm not making this up) and reflections from solar panels as well as bird strike stats that were not even close to realistic turned a whole pile of people off from wind energy and solar. But nowadays Greenpeace can't see enough windmill parks so all is good and your contributions are going towards something positive again, though, in all fairness I think Greenpeace really is more of a self-perpetrating PR machine and lobby group than an activist platform. The days of the Rainbow Warrior #1 are long behind us.
The interaction between 'Groenlinks' (a political party here) and Greenpeace led to some pretty weird results, I'm sure the coal, oil and natural gas lobbies were having a great old time with the green groups helping them.
Well, history will probably say that the actual realists where those that were promoting reducing energy consumption...
Regards Greenpeace specifically: I was already on the edge because they've quite frankly become more part of the problem than part of the solution for their stance on existing nuclear energy production. It makes absolutely no sense to close any nuclear generators early when you're still burning coal / peat / ignite / biomass without carbon capture and storage.
I fear such a complex issue such as energy production for billions of people is not really something which can be rated by 'common sense'.
> nuclear generation for 64 years now
and still no path for insurance/storage/reprocessing etc. Sellafield is one of the prime examples what can go wrong even in industrialized countries: it's a toxic and costly mix of military and commercial nuclear industry waste.
In the Western countries nuclear is mostly dead and investments are allocated only mostly for longer lifetimes of existing reactors. And this is not because of 'Greenpeace'. You need to find an answer why there is so little acceptance, why the industry is in such bad shape (examples: lack of reactor safety culture in the Japanese nuclear industry, lack of financial health in the French nuclear industry, Sellafield, ...) and why its only thriving with full-government support/finance (see China with its authoritarian structure or smaller countries who are keen to get nuclear technology to then also build up nuclear weapon technology/material like Iran).
Exactly the same argument applies to carbon waste. Every closed nuclear plant or nuclear plant not built means there is more carbon waste.
Edit: Can someone explain the downvotes? By carbon waste I mean CO2 emissions. We look set to destroy our civilization in the next few decades due to their elevated level.
Nuclear waste is tangible, CO2 is abstract, but other than that I don't see the difference between them.
No one has insurance for the damage caused by excess CO2, we don't have good ways of storing most of it, and we have only limited, tentative efforts to reprocess it from the atmosphere.
Instead of nuclear waste, we chose carbon waste by building more power sources that use carbon.
1. Before the current solar boom, virtually the only alternative was carbon. Referring to the last 5 decadesbn
2. Even now, my impression was generally that when nuke plants close, carbon is used as the replacement, due to its ability as a baseload supply.
For instance, in Germany new coal plants are set to open as part of the 2005 nuclear phase out: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/21/the-littl...
Likewise, Japan has boosted coal output in the wake of Fukushima, reversing an earlier trend: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/bucking-global-trend...
I had thought this was common knowledge. If not, I can see why my comment was downvoted and needed to be expanded on.
(On other words, at present and in recent decades I think there was a bifurcation between carbon and nuclear)
I don't know about Japan, but I live in Germany, and what's happening here isn't a shift back to carbon, it's short-term contracts. The operators of some carbon plants get short-term contracts, so existing plants can be operated at a higher percentage of capacity than they would if nuclear weren't being phased out. But follow the money: Noone's investing in new plants. The current contracts aren't encouraging enough to invest in new plants. And even the operators of some old plants are complaining about underuse.
There's a carbon-based plant near where I live that has never been permitted to produce power. It was one of the last carbon power plants built nearby, and eight years after being connected to the grid, it still hasn't produced power. They turn it on for a few hours now and then to test, that's all. Its neighbour ceased production five years ago, after only two years of production.
The key here is that the new power plants being built are wind and sun. Your wording could be interpreted as saying said that the shift is was only from nuclear to carbon, and when none of the new plants being built are carbon-fired, then you might well get downvoted for that.
https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/why-germanys-nuclear-phas...
Both extensions and new coal plants are there. I'll translate the key column: "plans declared invalid", "planning paused", "application submitted", "planning stopped", "being planned, blocked on (a kind of lawsuit)" and finally "being planned, building uncertain due to questions about profit".
The most interesting one is perhaps the first, which is an extension that started construction in 2007. It still isn't done and its license to operate is dependent on two lawsuits. From the public documents it's somewhat uncertain to me whether the license to operate is real. It might be a true yes, or it might be a complicated no: "you may use the new plant, but it has to emit less mercury than you possibly can achieve." I'm not sure. Either way, the owners don't seem to have spent much money on completing the building in the past year. They clearly have a license to build it and are spending money on lawyers and on removing some things that were leakily built, but AFAICT they aren't spending real money on progressing the building.
The wikipedia article on that links to https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/16/world-go... which you may find interesting.
The energycentral page says new plants are needed and will be built, but it doesn't name any. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_fossil-thermischen_K... names them. The list is a bit difficult to read. Following up on the recent ones, it seems that only one of the <10yo coal plants is both operating and planned to continue operating as a coal plant. I might have overlooked a detail or two, but not a trend.
It can also be true that nuclear closes coal, and renewable closes nuclear.
I chose solar waste.
You need to find an answer why there is so little
acceptance, why the industry is in such bad shape
Reason being I've heard at least 4 completely different explanations of why the nuclear industry performs so poorly, and I'm not really sure how to tell which is the right one - would be nice to know more.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20180902wnisr2018...
Because nobody cares if a jobber falls off a roof while installing a solar panel but if a technician is exposed to radiation everyone loses their minds!
Same reason people protest the windmill, and the dam, but not the solar roof. The thinking is, "The solar roof doesn't ruin my view or change my waterfront."
When it comes to NIMBY's, the N is more about the M than it is about the B or the Y. That's one constant in infrastructure projects that never changes.
Long distance electric transmission is a fairly solved problem. We can put the nuclear plant downwind in BFE. It's even easier than pumping around liquid energy because the electrons move themselves.
You don't hear people up in arms over the risk of catastrophe every time an oil tanker drives by. Why is nuclear any more special than an oil tanker off your coast?
Not so much with a nearby nuclear disaster.
Their renewables have basically been replacing nuclear, rather than coal as maybe we can agree would have been better.
Yes nuclear is on its way out, but I feel Greenpeace and its ilk havent got the order right.
Maybe not.
The vast investments in renewable energy (incl. technology, driving down costs, acceptance, grid, load prediction, offshore wind, decentralized energy production, de-centralized ownership, ...) instead of an incompatible nuclear landscape had and has huge impact in the feasibility of renewable energy - not just in Germany.
Coal gets also reduced. Maybe you have seen the massive protests of environmentalists in Germany against new coal power plants and further coal production. There is not much investment in coal-based electricity, because it is priced out of the market and quite a bit now needs to be exported, since there is not enough demand in Germany. Mid year 2018: renewable energy electricity production +10%, coal -10%. Renewable is now at 36% share of electricity production and now the first time more than coal. On two cold winter days the renewables provided 71.6% and 81% of electricity for Germany, an industrialized country with more than 80 million people.
This would have not been possible without the massive change in direction.
I guess the carbon cycle is relatively neutral as it's using existing environmental carbon plus some additional energy in the production and logistics process but it is unsustainable without turning every bit of harvestable forest into a monoculture of pine trees or fast growing deciduous with all the ecodiveristy of a Monsanto laced cornfield.
I'm not at all saying that nuclear should stay, so.
And I want to be clear. Look at the numbers of deaths from the three major accidents. (I'm on my phone so I'll try to remember to edit this to provide sources), but not that many people died or are predicted to die from Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Three Mile Island (which has a count of 0!) There's more people dying in the US every year from just the air pollution caused by coal plants than the total (already dead and predicted early deaths, find the highest number too!) From those accidents.
And I'd rather deal with a Coke can of highly radioactive waste a year than train loads of low radioactive waste a day (coal). In the end we do the same thing with them. Put it in the ground.
Yeah, there should be better options. Fusion is extremely promising. I'd love to see batteries become better and more environmentally friendly to make. But we're not there yet and we don't have time to wait. For these things to be invented. Build nuclear now. When those come to life, build them too. But we can't just keep arguing and do nothing. It is time to worry. It has been time to worry for awhile now.
1) We're decommissioning a recycling plant because no one wants to recycle rods.
2) We don't know where on earth we're going to put the waste from the decommissioning.
3) We don't know how we're going to do this quite yet, the technology doesn't exist.
4) It's going to take 100 years.
5) The entire endeavor was massively expensive (who's paying for this, btw?)
Given that, I'm not sure I can accept that Greenpeace is or was on the wrong side of common sense. They may not have seen the entire playing field, they may not have have have proposed the best solution when they started out, but given what they knew at the time of their inception, and how they've grown, I think they are on the right side of common sense.
I don't have a timeline of their stance on renewables, nor of coal/oil/gas, but they currently advocate for 100% renewables. And after reading that article, I think that's the only common sense position.
Fair enough, but at this point, it seems like they can, should, and do skip over nuclear and focus on 100% renewable. Their messaging may not be as effective as "clean coal" but that feels like a different debate.
Because it's so hard to get funding on anything, not that much research has been done on how to decontaminate radioactive waste. You might disagree about doing it in the first place, but still support research to clean up.
Because it's so hard to get permission to build new reactors, older reactors were used for longer. But we've learned a lot about safety and fail-safes since the 80s.
There's a very shabby strip club directly outside Amazon's meeting centre in Seattle for a similar reason. I'm told the owner wouldn't mind renovating or moving, but zoning laws make those difficult. So because the policy making is driven by morality and not rationality, you end up with weird (side)effects.
Like in Japan. Full support for nuclear from government and industry. Society not interested and not opposed.
The mechanism at play were then 'greed', 'corruption' and no sufficient safety culture. And this is not surprise: the so-called Japanese 'nuclear village' was well known.
There was nothing 'rational' about NOT increasing tsunami safety at Fukushima. It was about calculating a risk (probability and impact) and then making a decision about what to do. That's not rational - that's in the end a political decision.
No energy politics is rational. It's also not possible to be rational. There are vast commercial and other interests involved.
> Because it's so hard to get permission to build new reactors, older reactors were used for longer
Because it was much easier and cost effective, older reactor lifetimes were extended. We are talking about billions of investments.
> But we've learned a lot about safety and fail-safes since the 80s
Which then has priced nuclear out of the market - if there is a market - France for example has only a very limited electricity market - EDF is government owned. https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/finan... Areva/Orena is government owned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orano
Wait, what? How else are rational decisions made?
Fukushima was commissioned in 1970s, and was negligent. As were DuPont's actions with PFOA, the Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon. Nuclear is not special in that regard, it's just an easier target for fear-mongering.
Look, I'd be happy if all (non-medial) nuclear reactors were replaced by renewables and turned off. But compared to fossil fuels, nuclear power is not the worst idea humans have had.
> Wait, what? How else are rational decisions made?
For example by actually dealing with underlying bias - which the (nuclear) industry does not. Example: if the profitability of a company is at stake, then costly decisions are out of scope.
But 'rational decisions' probably don't exist and there is no method which can be applied to complex situations often found in energy politics.
If somebody claims to know how to make 'rational decisions', then this would be a sign to me that this person does not understand its problems and limitations.
> and was negligent
there is nothing rational about 'negligent'
As for nuclear power and research on cleanup - it appears this industry will be worth a lot of money post Fukushima which does appear to be spurring the requisite R&D, which should be good news for this kind of tech. Granted, probably not what is required to really make this decontamination jump to the level that it becomes "easy" but at least it is something better than "Oh sure eventually we'll put them on a train and stick them in the ground, you know, as long as the earth doesn't destroy those plans first with an earthquake, hurricane, etc"
I don't know about Greenpeace specifically, but the environmental movement as a whole has been pretty consistent through this whole time in their criticism of fossil fuels. You may or may not agree with criticisms around nuclear power, but that doesn't make it a double standard.
Has it been? I'm not really convinced that's actually the case because even if something nasty happens, the usual reaction seems to be to just pretend "everything is okay" and then raise the threshold levels for radiation exposure because that's pretty much the only thing that can be done.
Case in point: Fukushima is still sitting on loads of contaminated dirt and water, with no clue what to do with it [0].
On a global level that might be "minimal" but I doubt the local population cares very much about that distinction.
Imho this is quite similar to the naivety with which the US conducted their nuclear tests. Back then they also assumed "It's far enough away from population centers, there's no danger for anybody". Decades later, the statistics speak another language [1].
Which is a common problem with nuclear: Direct attribution is pretty much impossible and the long-term epidemiological studies required to recognize these effects are not only very complex but also extremely expensive.
Leading to a situation that down the road we might have repeated the same mistakes like previous generations before us did: Leaving the actual problems, and it's solutions, to following generations, who gonna curse us for our naivety and hubris.
There's also the factor that nuclear requires massive cooling, this last summer already has seen several plants, all over the globe, shut down/throttled down due to rivers running too hot for cooling [2]. If the trend of increasing average temperatures keeps on going, this will become a much more common issue.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3058303/look-at-the-millions-of-...
[1] https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/weatherwatch-nu...
This is also the case if we do nothing. Consider that the alternative to Nuclear is baseload generation with coal, oil and gas, which we know for a fact are destroying our environment by raising global temperatures. And they're ruining our air. They're not going away any time soon, either.
Particularly when it's about an industry that doesn't have an exactly stellar track record with "owning up" to their errors.
Because contrary to popular perception, the nuclear industry suffers just as much from "cutting corners" as any other profit-driven industry [0].
Costs and responsibilities for decommissioning and final waste storage are still issues we are a far away from solving [1].
Sorry for being such a Debbie Downer, but I just don't see any good way out of this that doesn't involve massively cutting back energy consumption on a global level.
Which is, of course, easier said than done. But it just feels like a massive oversight how we keep focusing on "increasing supply", while completely ignoring the option of "reducing demand" because it's too unpopular for any political support.
[0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/09/04/national/jcfc-s...
[1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear-idUKKCN0VP2...
I assume Greenpeace and other environmentalists would have prefered a much faster transition.
It's not just destroying a potentially clean stopgap energy source but destroying an entire advanced-technology industry in which the UK was once a leader.
Those green R&D projects aren't going to fund themselves.
That was the whole point of this plant, to reprocess spend fuel so it could be used again.
None of the countries that tried nuclear reprocessing have made it work, and now that it is shut down, this plant needs a complicated, multi billion $ cleanup.
So no, the nuclear waste does not get recycled, and we should figure out how to deal with it.
Calder Hall fire 1957: I was in the womb 100 miles downwind at that time and have reasons to be grateful for 'Cockroft's folly' [1]
Windscale Enquiry 1978: I was 20 then and THORP was bitterly opposed by environmental organisations, the Manx government and quite a few engineers, the latter on the grounds that it would never be viable [2, 3]
Nuclear power, especially with reactors that require heavily enriched fuel, in a small densely populated country, is always going to be problematic.
[1] https://www.khl.com/news/final-cockcroft-folly-is-demolished...
[2] http://www.worldcat.orgwww.worldcat.org/title/windscale-inqu...
[3] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1978/mar/...
Another interesting challenge for robots in ITER is that some may be exposed to such high levels of radiation that the: "designers can forget all the advances in electronics we have witnessed since the 1960s: only a few discrete transistors can be employed, with integrated circuits being forbidden for their sensitivity to radiation."[0]
[0]https://mappingignorance.org/2014/01/29/iter-engineering-cha...
Decommissioning is forecast to cost £4bn. Presumably at least £4bn, given the rest of the project's costs.
Subtract operating costs, which I can't find, and I wonder what the overall loss to British taxpayers is.
It seems quite suspect to me.
The use of nuclear isnt or wasn't always about 'cheap dnergy' but about energy security. Don't forget that we often don't think of tbe huge geopolitical costs of our continued reliance on oil.
The "radiation" from a reactor core mostly consists of highly energetic particles and gamma rays. It's not going to directly interfere with anything in the radio spectrum, or induce significant voltages on cables.
Radiation causes huge headaches in space because there's no way to pull it out or send in a replacement, and comms have seconds - minutes of lag. These don't apply to Earth based robots, even in super hazardous environments like this.
I wonder how many robots will become part of the contaminated decommissioning waste. Perhaps they will develop robots to disassemble and store the damaged and contaminated robots, filling a function like decomposers in nature.
Is it unlikely that a human would be able to work on the robots to repair them due to the levels of radiation?
See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20678838
"Most nuclear robots operate on power provided by a trailing umbilical. This means there are no batteries to change and no refuelling issues to contend with."
It's reasonably rare to have full or even semi-autonomous in nuclear due to the risks involved of something going wrong, or the thing just dying. Easier just to remote control down a cable.
See also https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/014399112112... for an interesting overview of robots used at Fukushima.
Note that these robots probably aren't usiu the latest 14nm process so they have a natural immunity to bit flips.
-Song names: We are the robots and Radioactivity, The song Radioactivity names Sellafield in the lyrics.
The version with "Chernobyl – Harrisburg – Sellafield – Hiroshima / Stop radioactivity ... / chain reaction and mutation / contaminated population" [2] is a later rewrite. In live performances, "Hiroshima" is now replaced with "Fukushima". The music is also darker than the original.
Highly recommend seeing them live, if you have the opportunity.
Cleaning this up is probably a similar challenge compared the Hanford plutonium reprocessing plant in the US. I hope they do a much better job this time around.
"Safe, clean, too cheap to meter." => "The estimated lifetime undiscounted cost of dealing with the Sellafield site increased to £67.5 billion." - WP
Not found anywhere: total, worldwide taxpayer funds spent or committed to subsidize and decommission.