
Inside Sellafield's death zone with the nuclear clean-up robots - ljf
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46301596
======
imglorp
> The environment group Greenpeace, which bitterly opposed the opening of
> Thorp, is enthusiastic about decommissioning.

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.

~~~
lispm
> wrong side of common sense

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).

~~~
graeme
>and still no path for insurance/storage/reprocessing etc.

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.

~~~
Arnt
I didn't downvote, but I expect you got downvoted for a misleading
bifurcation. You might well be interpreted as saying "the alternative to
nuclear power is more coal" which sounds sort of plausible until you think
about it. Or "every time we close a nuclear plant we need to open a new coal-
fired electricity plant to replace it". New coal plants isn't what's replacing
the nuclear plants that are being closed, so your bifurcation is just
misleading rhetoric.

~~~
graeme
Oh I guess I didn't make that explicit.

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...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/21/the-little-
reactor-that-could-germanys-grohnde-nuclear-plant/#2a18d8b821a4)

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...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/bucking-global-trends-japan-
again-embraces-coal-power)

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)

~~~
Arnt
You may confuse short-term and long-term actions.

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.

~~~
graeme
Do you have stats on that? I'm not German, so perhaps I'm ill informed, but
this report indicates that actual new coal plants have opened up in the past
decade.

[https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/why-germanys-nuclear-
phas...](https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/why-germanys-nuclear-phase-out-
leading-more-coal-burning)

~~~
Arnt
Don't need stats, the wikipedians have a complete list:
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerk...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerke_in_Deutschland)

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...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/16/world-going-slow-
coal-misinformation-distorting-facts) 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...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_fossil-
thermischen_Kraftwerken_in_Deutschland) 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.

------
hobbes78
I believe this to be the biggest problem of nuclear power, not the risks of an
accident. So while we have cheap energy today, the cost of containment will be
paid throughout thousands of years. This doesn't make any sense from the
economic perspective.

~~~
jlarocco
I'm not an expert, but I think nuclear "waste" that's radioactive enough to be
dangerous can be recycled to generate more electricity.

~~~
pacificmint
> I think nuclear "waste" that's radioactive enough to be dangerous can be
> recycled to generate more electricity.

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.

~~~
smueller1234
Some anecdotal data to support your assertion about nobody having made
reprocessing work: there are also significant amounts of highly radioactive
waste stranded at the former reprocessing plant in Karlsruhe, Germany. I used
to work in the greater facility.

------
Neil44
I visited there on a school trip and we all took the tour, I probably didn't
get as much out of it as I would now but I still remember it 25+ years later
so I guess it was worth it. The school also took us to see Electric Mountain
which has been on HN once or twice too IIRC. I guess it was a pretty science
loving school. Seeing these things first hand helped in putting extremist
views on the subject into context in later years.

------
benj111
The article doesn't mention it but Sellafield used to be known as Windscale
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire)

~~~
keithpeter
Calder Hall -> Windscale -> Sellafield

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...](https://www.khl.com/news/final-cockcroft-folly-is-
demolished/103263.article)

[2] [http://www.worldcat.orgwww.worldcat.org/title/windscale-
inqu...](http://www.worldcat.orgwww.worldcat.org/title/windscale-inquiry-
report/oclc/004641156)

[3] [https://api.parliament.uk/historic-
hansard/commons/1978/mar/...](https://api.parliament.uk/historic-
hansard/commons/1978/mar/22/windscale-inquiry-report)

------
gene-h
Many of these approaches for cleaning up nuclear waste from legacy nuclear
sites may also be useful for fusion reactors. I talked with one of the people
working on building robots for Sellafield and one of their other projects was
building a robot to refurbish parts for ITER. Nuclear fusion reactors like
ITER will need to go down periodically for maintenance. The amount of time the
reactor spends offline is lost money, so maintenance needs to be done as fast
as possible. So one of the robots they were working on would go into a pipe,
cut it into pieces, put in a new pipe and reweld it within 30 seconds.

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...](https://mappingignorance.org/2014/01/29/iter-engineering-challenges-
ofputting-the-sun-into-a-box-part-3/)

------
Symbiote
The article says THORP "Generated revenues of £9bn", and cost £1.8bn to build
(1994 pounds?).

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.

~~~
pippy
It looks like nuclear didn't grow as much as they were hoping. So Sellafield's
parent company could take their earnings and dump the tax payer with the clean
up cost. I won't be surprised if they put Sellafield into liquidation before
they finish clean up.

It seems quite suspect to me.

~~~
MistahKoala
Sellafield's owner is the NDA. Liquidating Sellafield would likely only end up
with it being handed to... the NDA.

------
Tehchops
Does the intense radiation not interfere with communications to the
drones/robots?

~~~
teraflop
Radiation can affect the electronics themselves (by corrupting data, or by
slow physical degradation of the physical hardware) but other than that, I
don't think it has any particularly noticeable effect on communications.

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.

~~~
csense
I'd think it's much less of a concern than in space. For one, space robots are
far enough away that there's a big time delay to Earth communications, these
robots will have control stations <1km away. So the only electronics on board
the actual robot should be fairly rugged motor drivers and wireless comms. Add
in an extra redundant copy or two of all the IC's (and possibly enough motors
to give redundant degrees of freedom), and a policy of pulling out and
rebuilding the robot when a certain number of non-function-impairing radiation
damage events occur, and it's a non-issue.

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.

~~~
aftbit
Also they won't need to lift the robot's mass into space (which costs on the
order of $5000/kg), so for most of the 'bots, they will be able to easily add
additional shielding around critical electronics. Robots which are intended to
fit into very small spaces might not have this option, but also hopefully will
be cheaper than their larger brothers.

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.

------
acd
I think of the music band Kraftwerks songs as somehow being ahead of its time.

-Song names: We are the robots and Radioactivity, The song Radioactivity names Sellafield in the lyrics.

~~~
Symbiote
The original English lyrics of "Radioactivity" ("Radioactivität") are
"Radioactivity / is in the air for you and me" [1].

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.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjCxJ8ErpYg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjCxJ8ErpYg)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBTn_3DBYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBTn_3DBYo)

------
shaqbert
Mox fuel based nuclear reactors never really took off. Thus producing mox fuel
by reprocessing used nuclear fuel rods never turned out to address a big
market.

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.

------
8bitsrule
tldr: Site of a 1957 uranium fire at Windscale.

"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.

