Were it not for the constant sounds of our radiation monitors, the building would not look much different from any other aged industrial site.
But in fact, we are in one of the world’s largest and most unstable nuclear waste depots in the UK’s race to develop nuclear power and atomic bombs during the Cold War.
The Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS) from Sellafield to Cumbria has been described as the most dangerous building in Western Europe.
Even Sellafield Ltd, which now manages the site on behalf of the taxpayer, does not question the description.
The nuclear regulator, the ONR, has described the building as “intolerable risk”.
Now, finally, the engineers are facing it.
We are watching as they prepare to send a robotic catch to one of the waste silos below to catch some of the first batches of nuclear waste.
A thick leaded glass window protects us and the robot operator from the radiation below. It looks like a fairground robber, only instead of a stuffed animal, the prize is a bucket full of intensely radioactive mud.
There is a sense of pride among the team of engineers who designed the British-built “recovery machine”, but also the relief.
Finally, they can start emptying the building and moving the waste to a modern store.
“It’s such a significant time,” said Chris Halliwell, who is the head of the recovery program.
Mr. Halliwell has devoted much of his career to emptying the building, considered the only way to make it safe.
The MSSS building was built in the late 1950s to house waste from the UK’s growing fleet of nuclear reactors.
For decades, the waste has dissolved in an intensely radioactive sludge that releases hydrogen gas into the air above, a potentially explosive mixture that must be constantly ventilated.
And the building is aging badly, in 2019, radioactivity began to seep back into the soil previously contaminated by a leak in the 1970s.
It won’t be a quick job. The handle removes less than one cubic meter of waste in any tablespoon.
“It’s like emptying a wheeled bin with a teaspoon,” Halliwell said.
The project is expected to last at least 20 years, but time passes differently in Sellafield.
Our next stop is the building that will house the repackaged waste from the MSSS building for the next century.
Unlike its neighbor’s decaying concrete, the Box Encapsulation Plant Product Store (BEPPS) is a vast concrete sarcophagus with walls more than two meters thick, served by an underground tunnel and robotic cranes that can transport waste in boxes. made specifically in the store. without humans having to approach it.
The resounding tunnel will eventually link up eight vaults that can store most of Sellafield’s waste until a permanent “geological storage” facility is found to store it forever.
In a few weeks, the new building will be ready for use. We will be one of the last humans to stop in the tunnel for a hundred years.
Removing waste from the MSSS building is a big time for Sellafield Ltd, but the costs of dealing with our Cold War nuclear legacy are colossal.
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Nuclear dismantling costs the taxpayer more than £ 3bn a year. Sellafield alone is expected to cost £ 97 billion to clean up over the next 120 years.
Can the government justify a new nuclear program if it costs so much to clean up the last one? And can the industry be trusted to clean up, given the costly mess left in Sellafield?
“The priority at the time was in fact the military and then the expansion of civilian nuclear power that left us with inherited challenges,” said Phil Hallington, Sellafield’s chief policy officer.
New nuclear power plants have to raise money to pay for their own closure, so in theory, at least, the taxpayer should not be allowed to collect the bill.
But to build trust, “we need to keep our share of the business here in Sellafield,” Hallington said.