Windscale * Sellafield * Thorpe * Calder Hall. Call it whatever you like. It's all the same thing.
They sold us the idea of nuclear fuel to combat the looming menace of global warming. Now we are pretty sure that climate change is actually a normal part of Earth's cycles, why do we continue using dangerous nuclear fuel which remains radioactive for thousands of years?
One answer to this is their location. In the UK, ALL nuclear power plants are located in areas of high unemployment. Won't matter too much if we take down this type of population, eh. Besides, they're not as likely to be litigious. If you run a cost-benefit analysis, it's probably profitable to take out a chunk.
What is/was Sellafield? It's a randomly thrown-together site that reprocesses and decommissions nuclear fuel. It was the world's first commercial nuclear power plant to mass-generate electricity. In the early days, it produced weapon-grade plutonium-239.
In the 1950s, there was a big fire resulting in Britain's worst ever nuclear accident. On the International Nuclear Event Scale the disaster clocked a Level 5 (the scale only goes up to 7). Shortly after the disaster, it changed its name from Windscale to Sellafield, an attempt to outrun the bad press. Windscale and Sellafield are just different names for the same beast.
In the early 2000s Sellafield featured again on the International Nuclear Event Scale. This time it was Level 3, a radioactive leak.
Countries as far away as Canada are affected by the pollution leaking from Sellafield. Scandanavia and Ireland too.
Incidentally, there was a link to the mass shooter, David Bird, who'd 'resigned' from Sellafield after being accused of theft. He went on a bit of a rampage, killing 12 people and injuring many more. The plant went into lock-down that day, alerting employees not to turn up for their shift until the gunman was no longer active. Many rumours did the rounds ranging from brain injury to radioactive overexposure. Who's to know? But 3 of his dead victims were once employees at Sellafield. Perhaps there's something they're not telling us.
The very kind media took care of our delicate sensibilities, postponing some of their more violent entertainment: (Coronation Street, a soap opera!). Also a crime special on a panel game show. We can't be upsetting the public with fiction and game shows. Various artists, journalists and performers were also admonished during this time. No jokes allowed!
Clusters of childhood leukaemia were popping up in the areas surrounding Sellafield, showing that there was double the risk of leukaemia in children in that area.
The ECRR 2010 Recommendations of the European Committee on Radiation Risk goes into more detail. It discusses many issues within the nuclear industry, including problems with their peer reviewed journals; they circle jerk each other's papers for approval, rejecting articles that contradict their own agendas. This is a tactic to outwit genuine scientific consensus. Another illuminating point can be found in the 'Errors in published epidemiological studies of radiation risk'. For example:
In Wales, cancer cases have been removed from the database with the result that Sellafield effects on coastal population have been diminished or erased. After the Windscale fire, the direction of the fallout plume was changed and meteorological records were tampered with to minimise the effects on Ireland and the Isle of Man. In Germany, infant mortality records were altered to 'lose' the Chernobyl effect.
They also found some damning evidence in sheep shit, kids' teeth and autopsy specimens. Retinoblastoma (devastating eye cancer) rates were found to be high in the kids of Sellafield workers.
People aren't the only casualties, of course. Wildlife has suffered too. Fish populations are dwindling (conveniently blamed on overfishing), but the black-headed gull population has vanished from the Ravenglass estuary (near Sellafield) and fishermen don't bother with them at all. Even our wheat has mutated. Pesky fishermen! What will they do next?
So, money! Nuclear fuel was paraded around as a cleaner, more environmentally-friendly, cheaper alternative to SCARCE fossil fuels. Read why that's bollocks @sift666.
According to my government, tidying this mess up could cost up to £222 billion. Yes, BILLION! Decommissioning and clean-up operations are projected to reach into the 22nd century and cost around £3 billion annually! They put this down to naïve science during the cold war and a bit of wear and tear! Source. Whatever. It doesn't sound like much of a bargain to me.
But on the bright side, they expect generate about £10 billion in income from 20015-27. Well played, CEOs. The positive spin is that they're able to drive these costs down in cases where the job is a bit more straightforward. Yes, because pimping out work to the lowest bidder always goes well, right. Also, there's a pretty and optimistic chart showing that technology is advancing (yay!) so we may be able to science our way out of this mess if we just science hard enough. This won't happen, of course. Big Money infests Science to its very DNA.
Anyway, according to the government, nextgen nuclear power stations will be built by the private sector. So, we haven't learned that maybe these things are not such a good idea. Maybe next time it all goes tits up, we can get to feel good, burning the incompetent commercial entity (well, its name at least) while mopping up the devastation in our back yard.
But maybe we won't be the ones to deal with it. A process called 'vitrification' takes radioactive matter and suspends it in glass which is stable for quite a long time (more stable than the liquid form of waste anyways). These giant lumps of glass are then buried as a nice surprise for future generations.
Good luck with that, kids.
Thanks for reading.
Love
Anj x
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