What passes for a breakthrough:

Some of the UK's oldest spent nuclear fuel to be moved from a "'locked vault' with no plan for retrieving its contents or decommissioning the building" into a "newly built facility at the site."

#Sellafield #NuclearWaste #NuclearPower #UK #Cumbria @sts

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-66521223

"Divers in Sellafield nuclear pool for first time in 65 years"

"The nuclear power plant in Cumbria went out of use in the 1960s, and the pool was built in the 1940s for use by Windscale Piles, the site's first nuclear reactors, for the cooling, storage and de-canning of spent fuel as part of the UK's post-war atomic weapons programme. According to records, it was last entered back in 1958 to repair a broken winch, and now divers are back in the water with the rather unpleasant task of clearing sludge."

@histodons #nuclear #NuclearWaste #Sellafield #Windscale #ColdWar #divers

https://www.scubadivermag.com/divers-in-sellafield-nuclear-pool-for-first-time-in-65-years/

Spent nuclear fuel is the most substantive product of human civilization. It will be in our descendants' world long after our cities, languages and gods are forgotten.

"Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site"

"Nothing is produced at #Sellafield anymore. But making safe what is left behind is an almost unimaginably expensive and complex task that requires us to think not on a human timescale, but a planetary one"

@nuclearhumanities @sts #Windscale #nuclear #coldwar #EnvHist #nuclear #UK #Cumbria

Guardian Long Read: https://shrtm.nu/MOAp

"How Britain plans to bury its nuclear waste"

"A popular seaside town is a contender for storing Britain's spent nuclear fuel"

One more bad solution to a problem that has been dismissed for almost a century, but which will pose risk to living creatures for millennia

Telegraph: https://shrtm.nu/nDFU

#nuclear #NuclearPower #NuclearWaste #Cumbria #Sellafield #Anthropocene

The radioactive fallout from the 1957 fire at the Windscale site, since renamed Sellafied, was far worse than originally claimed. The site operated two nuclear reactors to manufacture plutonium for UK nuclear weapons.

The Irish Centre for High-end Computing calculated the fallout distribution using wind and rain data from the time, and found that the fire, which burned inside a nuclear reactor for 3 days, spread radiation across the British Isles, and Northern Europe.

Below is their computer recreation of the spread of radiation from the Windscale Fire.

"Revisiting the 1957 Windscale Nuclear Accident using Atmospheric Reanalysis data"

https://shrtm.nu/E7Lj

#nuclear #histodons @histodons #Windscale #Sellafield #STS

Wir müssten eine der gefährlichsten Atommülldeponien mal aufräumen, aber das ist ja nicht so eilig. #sellafield #kernenergie #atomkraft https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530053-800-shocking-state-of-worlds-riskiest-nuclear-waste-site/