Also see today's "Sellafield nuclear site hacked by groups linked to Russia and China" article in The Guardian.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-nuclear-site-hacked-groups-russia-china" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-...</a>
I first learned about Sellafield when I tried to decipher what name Kraftwerk was saying in their song "Radio-Activity" (along with Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Harrisburg (Three Mile Island)) <a href="https://youtu.be/X--F5b5IdqU?si=P6DoR6-VXUC1b50I" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/X--F5b5IdqU?si=P6DoR6-VXUC1b50I</a>
Sellafield is historically most directly comparable to the Hanford Reservation in the US (southeastern Washington), about which you could say most of the same things: one of the largest contamination sites, with an extremely long and expensive remediation timeline.
<i>"The estimated cost of running and cleaning up the site have soared. Sellafield is so expensive to maintain that it is considered a fiscal risk by budgetary officials. The latest estimate for cleaning up the Britain’s nuclear sites is £263bn, of which Sellafield is by far the biggest proportion. However, adjustments to its treatments in accounts can move the dial by more than £100bn, more than the UK’s entire annual deficit. The cost of decommissioning the site is a growing liability that does not count towards the calculation of the UK’s net debt."</i><p>Frightening on many dimensions
Previously known as Windscale<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcsyMvQtlKs" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcsyMvQtlKs</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOgSlFkv71U" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOgSlFkv71U</a>
I have no doubt costs are high (after all, it’s a government project and it has the word “nuclear” in the name).<p>That said, the article reads like anti-nuclear fear mongering: “SEE! This is why we have to ban nuclear power because nuclear waste cannot be stored safely!”<p>I am strongly pro-nuclear as part of a green energy strategy; it’s very clean and runs when the sun isn’t shining and when the wind isn’t blowing. I think it is more expensive than it needs to be due to over-regulation and NIMBY lawsuits.<p>I think in the US at least we had a very sound solution (Yucca Mountain) for storing nuclear waste, again killed by NIMBY.
When I was growing up, my granddad had a row of a weird black raspberry. It had huge, berries with a distinct taste, and all the assorted insects always present on other raspberries never showed up on these ones. They also never got moldy.<p>He said the variety is called Cumberland.<p>Now I can't stop wondering about any connection to that nuclear waste.