A day trip to Sellafield

Earlier in the week the nukes campaign team were lucky / unlucky (delete as appropriate) enough to be taken on a tour of Sellafield, the UK's biggest nuclear site. And it was a bit of an eye opener.

It's a massive site, covering about 4km², which meant we couldn't see everything in one go. So we spent most of our time in the vitrification plant watching high level waste being mixed with molten glass and poured into huge milk churns prior to storage (this stuff is so dangerous that if you placed a flask of it in the centre circle of a football pitch and tried to walk to it from the dug out, it would kill you before you reached it), and then in the hugely expensive Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP).

Prior to a leak of highly radioactive waste in 2005, THORP's job was to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and turn it into uranium and plutonium, useful for making, well, more nuclear fuel and more nuclear weapons. But since the leak, the reprocessing has stopped and the plant has been off-line. And it doesn't look like opening for the foreseeable future.

Because of this, THORP also houses a 100m long, 8m deep storage pond full of spent nuclear fuel from the UK and abroad. This is probably one of the most intensely radioactive places on the planet. We also saw in passing the remaining Windscale pile, what's left of the Calder Hall reactors, the Windscale AGR and lots of trains ("safely") carrying flasks of radioactive fuel. Oh, and the CHP unit that powers the whole site.

Whilst it was undoubtedly fascinating to see how Sellafield operates, it is a very eerie place indeed. There is a constant beeping noise like a heart beat inside all the nuclear areas, apparently to let you know that everything's fine, but you can't help feeling like you're stuck in the middle of some huge, and rather dangerous, living creature. And places like the Shear Cave in THORP, where fuel is chopped to bits behind heavily shielded walls, look weirdly organic, like an anomalous cross between something out of HR Giger and HP Lovecraft's more outré moments.

Despite staff telling you that everything was perfectly safe and there was no risk from radiation at all, you couldn't help thinking that it just might not be the case. Especially when you hear some of the stories about what's gone on at the most dangerous parts of Sellafield, like B30. I can't imagine how this place is ever going to be decommissioned and made clean. Which is criminal when you look around you and see the Lake District and Scafell on the horizon.

On the way back home I got the train from the soul-destroyingly bleak Sellafield station (note to whoever paid £400,000 to have it upgraded and "renovated": you were seriously ripped off), I got to thinking. And what struck me most was the amount of brain power and ingenuity, not to mention billions of pounds, that has gone into developing ways to store and reprocess the radioactive detritus from our nuclear power stations. What a huge waste of resources and talent that really is. How different could things be if all this effort, brain power and cash were channelled elsewhere, like towards creating a decentralised energy system for the UK?

Back in the office the next day I read a slightly scary story about a Sellafield worker who was arrested for building a bomb in his bedroom. Having seen the stuff that goes on inside the plant first hand, it really does make you wonder.