Sellafield (Windscale, Drigg, Calder Hall) Nuclear Facility Leaks:

UK Armed Civil Nuclear Constabulary

News from UK ITV 1st March 2016.

Workers at Sellafield have finally finished removing stocks of historic nuclear fuel from the site's Pile Fuel Storage Pond.
It's being described as a "milestone" moment, which has made the entire UK safer, and also as the most significant clean-up step in Sellafield's history.

The development means radioactivity at the 68-year-old Pond has been reduced by 70 percent, vastly reducing the risk it poses to people and the environment.

Sellafields 68 Year Old Crumbling Concrete Spent Fuel Rod Storage Pond

Paul Foster, MD of Sellafield Ltd said:

"Removing decades-old corroded fuel from an ageing facility and placing into modern containment makes Sellafield, and the whole of the UK, a far safer place.
The enormity of the challenge cannot be underestimated – the pond was built with no design for how its contents would be removed.

The removed fuel has been transferred to a modern storage building at Sellafield where it can be held in a far safer environment."

Storm Desmond has surprisingly not been reported in connection with any flooding at the Sellafield and Drigg nuclear facilities - perhaps that location was unaffected?

The owners LLW Repository Ltd are not even sure themselves what is in the pits at Drigg, which is a few kilometres from the main Sellafield plant.
The company was forced to post an advertisement in local newspapers asking former workers if they could remember what was dumped there.
It stated: “We are very keen to speak to people who were directly involved in consigning nuclear waste during the 1960s to the mid-1980s in order to build up a comprehensive picture of the waste inventory in the trenches.”

Beach at Drigg Dump Site.

A massive nuclear dump near Sellafield and just over 160km from Ireland is “certain to leak” in the near future, an official report has warned.
Environmentalists have described the site which is just kilometres from Dublin and the densely-populated east coast as a “slow motion Chernobyl”.

The UK’s Environment Agency has now admitted it was a huge mistake to build the huge nuclear dustbin so close to the coast.
While authorities have played down the consequences, the report confirmed the dump will eventually be flooded and some of the radioactive waste stored there will spew into the Irish Sea.

Since the start of its operation, hundreds of accidents have occurred at the plant, and around two thirds of the buildings themselves are now classified as nuclear waste. The plant releases some 8 million litres of contaminated waste into the sea on a daily basis, making the Irish Sea the most radioactive sea in the world.

Swim anyone?

Nuvia 'Argocat' Searching Cumbria Beaches

With Front-Mounted Electronics Box And Geiger Counter

 - Collecting Radioactive Materials - Contracted to Sellafield.

- The Civil Nuclear Constabulary web-site describes itself as "a police force like no other." - And goes on to describe Sellafield - " ..it's a great area for families,"

A CNC career has an assured future (Half life of Plutonium-244 is 80.8 MILLION YEARS. (plutonium-242 is only 373,300 years).

U.K. Civil Nuclear Constabulary 'Pin-up'

Marty K.

Further inside story of the big 1957 fire in the pile check-out: damninteresting.com/ the-windscale-disaster

WIKIPEDIA says:
The core of the reactors consisted of a large block of graphite with horizontal channels drilled through it for the fuel cartridges. Each cartridge consisted of a uranium rod about 30 cm long encased in an aluminium canister to protect it from the air, as uranium becomes highly reactive when hot and can catch fire. The cartridge was finned, allowing heat exchange with the environment to cool the fuel rods while they were in the reactor. Rods were pushed in the front of the core, the "charge face", with new rods being added at a calculated rate. This pushed the other cartridges in the channel towards the rear of the reactor, eventually causing them to fall out the back, the "discharge face", into a water filled channel where they cooled and could be collected.^[7] The chain reaction in the core converted the uranium into a variety of isotopes, including some plutonium, which was separated from the other materials using chemical processing. As this plutonium was intended for weapons purposes, the burn-up of the fuel would have been kept low to reduce production of the heavier plutonium isotopes (²⁴⁰Pu, ²⁴¹Pu etc.).

In the end, Price's concerns came to pass. So many cartridges missed the water channel that it became routine for staff to walk through the chimney ductwork with shovels and scoop the cartridges back into the water.^[12] On other occasions, fuel cartridges became stuck in the channels and burst open while still in the core.^[13] In spite of these precautions and the stack filters, Frank Leslie had discovered radioactivity around the site, but this information was kept secret, even from the staff at the station

Link to later post: https://flicense.blogspot.com/2018/09/uks-cumbria-explosively-beautiful.html
M.K.

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