A
police vehicle with blue lights flashing races up uncomfortably close
behind my car. It is January in northwest England: the Cumbrian
countryside, 1.5km from the main gate of the Sellafield nuclear
facility, the most toxic and dangerous site in western Europe. The
officer gesturing to pull over seems to want a word.
As
he approaches the car window, it is apparent he carries a gun. It isn’t
drawn, but the way he struts seems calculated to draw attention to it.
Seconds later another police car arrives. The two officers who emerge
from it are more heavily armed. They hang back, but their ensemble looks
similar to other officers seen earlier at Sellafield’s main gate. These
ones are carrying automatic weapons.
They
are all members of the civil nuclear constabulary (CNC), the specially
trained force that guards Britain’s most sensitive nuclear sites. These
are no bored mall cops pulling over people for kicks. Counterterrorism
and prevention of espionage are high on their list of responsibilities.
The
first officer is polite but firm as he explains why he pulled over the
car. He spotted it parked near the side of the road close to
Sellafield’s main gate.
“What were you doing outside your vehicle? Taking pictures? What for?”
He seems dissatisfied with the answer: that it was journalism. Then he clocks the accent.
“Ah,
The Irish Times,” he says, studying the press identification he is
given. He says he knows all about the history of Sellafield and Ireland.
The Irish government had years ago sued Britain over safety fears at the site. Sellafield has loomed large in the Irish psyche since its 1980s heyday.
“What
is your story about?” the officer asks. He gets a polite version of
“mind your own business”. Undeterred, he presses further.
“Do
you mind if I ask if it has anything to do with the recent coverage of
Sellafield in the media?” he says, presumably referring to Guardian
reports weeks earlier alleging that Sellafield’s IT systems had been hacked by Russia and China,
and that the workforce culture was rotten – claims Sellafield has
denied. The site’s regulator this week announced plans to prosecute
Sellafield for alleged IT security offences.
The
officer gets the same polite rebuff. It takes his colleagues another 15
minutes to verify the ID and car details. Then, just as it is time to
go, Cumbria police also rush to the scene and want to know what’s going
on. Eventually, with everyone satisfied, the time comes to depart, but
only after a final warning from the CNC: “Your car is now logged in our
system so you might be pulled over if it’s seen again.”
Sellafield: a byword for danger
The
700-acre Sellafield complex means different things to different people.
To UK authorities it is a decommissioning hub being used to spearhead
the clean-up of Britain’s early nuclear industry mistakes, made before
the issue of long-term waste disposal was a priority.
In
Ireland, about 180km away,Sellafield is mostly seen as a potential
hazard, a byword for danger. A former reprocessing site for lethal spent
nuclear fuel rods, it was also known for a now-defunct power plant that
was tacked on, Calder Hall, but this was only ever a minor part of it.
Reprocessing was the main activity.
These
days, Sellafield is seen as more of a nuclear dump for the most
radioactive material from all over the UK, with work ongoing in a
100-year, £134 billion (€156 billion) decommissioning project.
Yet
another view of Sellafield: in the eyes of one nuclear industry source,
the site is a “gravy train” for well-paid staff and big contractors.
Sellafield Ltd, the site’s UK state-owned operator whose mission is to
make it safe, spends more than £2.5 billion each year on the clean-up
strategy. It is also a bustling 24-hour workplace for 11,000 people paid
an average of €91,000 each annually.
Behind
the razor wire, the gun-toting guards, 3.6m-high security fences and
blast barriers, the Sellafield site is also a self-contained town with
its own railway and 1,000 buildings. Some date back to the 1950s and are
crumbling to bits, creating further hazards with the nuclear waste
stored inside.
Sellafield
is also the home to the world’s biggest stockpile of plutonium and four
of the most hazardous buildings in Europe: two ageing nuclear silos
with a history of leaks, and a pair of storage ponds filled with
hazardous material. The most notorious pond, unit B30, is known as
“Dirty 30″.
Since
9/11, however, Sellafield has also been viewed as a potential target
for the UK’s enemies, including terrorists who might seek to attack it
or acquire material for a so-called nuclear “dirty bomb”. This explains
the recent intense focus on the facility after December’s Guardian allegations of cybersecurity hacks and claims by whistleblowers of bad staff morale, which critics say increase risk.
Its
status also helps to explain the eagle-eyed approach of the CNC,
exemplified in the car encounter described above. Eight weeks and one
intense security vetting process later, The Irish Times returns to
Sellafield, but this time with official clearance – the nuclear version
of a Willy Wonka golden ticket.
The
site’s critics, including the UK academic and radioactivity adviser to
the Irish State, Dr Paul Dorfman, warn that the nuclear industry tries
to dazzle outsiders with glossy public relations. Sellafield, meanwhile,
says it is only trying to be honest and open about what it does.
The
company, which answers to the UK government through the Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority (NDA), confirms that The Irish Times is the
first media outlet from the Republic to be granted recent access to the
site and its inner sanctum, where the most dangerous nuclear material is
handled.
Thirty years after U2′s Bono landed on a nearby beach in a Greenpeace protest, and almost 20 years after the Republic last tried to sue the UK over its safety risks, its existential relevance to Ireland remains. Sellafield hasn’t gone away, you know. The battle to keep it safe goes on.
‘Most radioactive sea in the world’
Sellafield
overlooks the Irish Sea on the coast just beyond the western edge of
the Lake District, the most undulating and, arguably, most beautiful
part of England. The closest big town is the former coal port of
Whitehaven, which centuries ago was a hub of trade to Ireland. Just more
than an hour’s drive away is the closest city, Carlisle, an old
fortress 15 minutes from the Scottish border.
Traditionally
the area was prominent in mining and farming, while Cumbrian sausages
are world-famous. For the last 75 years, western Cumbria has also been
notorious as the capital of the British nuclear industry, which has
also been in decline, although fresh investment in nuclear is planned by
the UK.
[ Sellafield leaks: How alarmed should we be about reports of discharge at nuclear waste plant? ]
Driving
past the village of Egremont, which has grown prosperous in the hills
above the facility, the luscious countryside suddenly falls away and the
sprawling industrial hub below emerges from the surrounding farmlands,
with the spring sun bouncing off its metal roofs for our official visit
earlier this month.
The
visit is tightly controlled by the company, but it nevertheless grants
access to all areas requested. These include the danger zone where the
four most hazardous old buildings, including “Dirty 30″, are cramped
together, and where one leaks daily bathfuls of radioactive liquid into
the ground.
Sellafield
also grants The Irish Times access to the old Thorp reprocessing plant,
the Magnox East River fuel rod storage plant and the Sixep effluent
facility that, like a nuclear kidney, filters radioactive pondwater that
it is then pumped into the Irish Sea.
The
tour is led by three senior Sellafield staff, including scientist Dr
Rex Strong, the head of regulatory integration. He received an OBE in
the king’s birthday honours list last year for his four decades in the
nuclear industry. Strong was an outside adviser on the clean-up after
the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2014. He is also something of
an Irish whisperer for Sellafield – since the 1970s he has been
deployed to allay regular bouts of safety fears in the Republic.
With
polite understatement, he says relations between Sellafield’s UK
masters and the Republic were once “not good”. Then the company
employed consultants in Dublin to reach out to local Irish interests.
One of the biggest Irish concerns was over the dumping of nuclear
pondwater into the Irish Sea, which earned it the dubious reputation as
the “most radioactive sea in the world”.
Information-sharing
improved after Ireland’s failed attempt to sue Britain in The Hague
almost two decades ago. “Relations moved from hostile to something more
adult,” says Strong, who used to sit on the bilateral UK-Ireland Contact
Group on Radiological Matters that to this day still shares information
on nuclear safety.
‘Bottomless pit of hell, money and despair’
“Sellafield
has a really huge inventory of nuclear waste, and it’s the really nasty
stuff,” says Dorfman, a nuclear expert at the University of Surrey. He
is also a member of the radiation protection committee (RPAC) that
advises the Republic through the Environmental Protection Agency. He
also founded Nuclear Consulting Group, which lobbies against nuclear
power – he actually favours renewables.
“The
risks from the site are enormous. There is good reason why a former UK
politician was recently quoted as saying it was a ‘bottomless pit of
hell, money and despair’. You’ve got all these mind-boggling hazards and
a philosophical debate over how does one live with this.”
Waste
stored in Sellafield is categorised into material of low, intermediate
and high levels of risk. The latter would kill anybody who came into
contact with it almost immediately, say staff on the tour.
Much
of the most dangerous materials are byproducts of the reprocessing of
spent nuclear fuel rods, which basically means recycling them to
extract more plutonium and uranium. The leftover liquids are
particularly toxic. Sellafield stopped reprocessing fuel rods only in
2022.
Most
of its waste was sent to the site from other British nuclear
facilities, such as the 26 Magnox reactors that were carbon copies of
the old Calder Hall power plant pioneered on the Sellafield site in the
1950s. That flow of waste ended when Magnox was phased out in 2018.
Later-era
AGR nuclear reactors – there were 14 built in the UK, including the
familiar so-called Golf Ball reactor at Sellafield – also sent their
waste to Sellafield. There are about seven AGRs still operating which
still send material, but only for “chopping up” and storing, and not for
reprocessing.
About
80 per cent by volume is low-risk material, such as paper, pens and
personal protective equipment used in radioactive areas. It is sent to a
repository nearby. Ireland itself produces such low-level waste in
facilities such as hospital X-ray departments.
When
asked whether the Irish government had ever requested that Sellafield
take the Republic’s radioactive waste, Strong replies, “We might have
been asked, and we might have said no thanks.”
This
week, the Department of the Environment in Dublin said low-level Irish
waste is stored in dedicated rooms in hospitals and other facilities
until the radioactivity depletes, then it is put in the rubbish.
Anything imported in a “sealed” fashion with higher radioactivity is
returned to sender after use.
About
19 per cent of the waste at Sellafield is intermediate risk and highly
dangerous. It includes the solid casings from old nuclear fuel rods,
which are chopped up, mixed with concrete and stored in special sealed
containers. It also includes old equipment and skips that touched
high-level waste.
About
1 per cent by volume is the really bad stuff: high-risk, most
problematic material such as old fuel rods that take decades to cool
down after being pulled out of nuclear reactors, and liquids that are
left over from reprocessing before being solidified in glass.
‘Like emptying a wheelie bin with a teaspoon’
The
first stop on the Sellafield tour takes us to Thorp, the 1990s facility
that reprocessed waste on a commercial basis from reactors all over the
world, including Japan. Material is stored in containers placed inside
containers, similar to “Russian dolls”, according to one staff member.
These are sunk in 8m-deep pools of shimmering blue water, which acts
as a barrier to the radiation. The water is pumped in from the deepest
lake in England, Wast Water in the Lake District.
Next
we visit the most dangerous area on the site, the compound with the
four oldest and most decrepit structures holding toxic materials. It
includes the “Dirty 30″ surface pond and also B38, known as the Magnox
Swarf Storage Silo. This has been leaking since at least 2019, and it
is too dangerous to go inside to do repairs. Much of the material was
dumped there for storage in the 1950s and 1960s.
“That
material cannot be left in those buildings,” says Strong. “The
structures were not built to modern standards. They are a hazard. We
also don’t know exactly what is in them – record keeping wasn’t always
great back then.”
This is one of the most dangerous sites in the world. That is not a question, it is a fact
— Dr Paul Dorfman, radioactivity adviser to the Irish State
No
human can enter the inner core of these buildings – the environment is
lethal. So Sellafield engineers are building elaborate,
remote-controlled “fairground grabbers” to pluck the material out slowly
over time and move it into special skips for safer storage in modern
facilities.
“But
it’s like emptying a wheelie bin with a teaspoon,” says Strong. “It
could take until the 2050s.” There are 10,000 skips of material to
remove from B38 alone – only 40 have been removed so far.
This
compound with the most dangerous materials is behind several extra
layers of security: airport-style personal checks, with individual
pin-controlled access cards and higher razor-wire fences around
individual buildings. Staff wear “active area” protective clothing,
while everyone present wears personal radiation monitors that chip with
greater frequency as the exposure increases. The signs say “highly
radioactive area – no loitering”. So we don’t.
Inside
the buildings, you hear a constant tick-tock noise similar to the radar
sound on-board nuclear submarines in the movies. This sounds means the
facility is operating safely. If it bursts into a siren, it is time to
run. Each time you leave an active area, you must check your entire body
with a hand-held device – a “frisk probe” – that crackles like a Geiger
counter when it detects contamination.
One-third
of Sellafield’s £2.5 billion annual budget is spent dealing with this
tiny legacy compound. The buildings are old, leaky and too close
together to implement better-engineered solutions.
Toxic workplace allegations
The
recent allegations of IT hacking published in the Guardian prompted the
UK government, through environment secretary Claire Coutinho, to seek
an explanation. The authorities subsequently seemed to accept
Sellafield’s rejection of the core of the allegations.
The
Guardian said sleeper malware had been injected into Sellafield’s
systems by groups linked to Russia and China as far back as 2015, and
that some of the bugs may still be present. It also accused the company
of not notifying everything to regulators.
This
week – before charges related to cybersecurity were announced –
Sellafield told The Irish Times: “We have no records or evidence to
suggest that Sellafield Ltd networks have been successfully attacked by
state or non-state actors. Our monitoring systems are robust and we have
a high degree of confidence that no such malware exists on our system.”
The
Guardian had stood over its report, even after Sellafield’s chief
executive, Euan Hutton, denied the accusations on the BBC. The UK’s
Office for Nuclear Regulation had denied any foreign hacking and had
implemented “special measures” for monitoring Sellafield for weaknesses
in its IT system.
[ Government pressed to reveal how much it knew about reported Sellafield leak ]
Dorfman
says the hacking allegations “give pause for thought”. He also referred
to an alleged risk from a “toxic workplace culture” at the site. The
Guardian said many current and former staff told it of concerns over
bullying, harassment and belittlement, and that some people had taken
their own lives.
Sellafield
has denied any link between the plant and suicide, but has
acknowledged issues over workplace culture in the past, particularly
after a companywide 2018 staff survey that pointed to concerns over
morale.
The
Irish Times has seen a staff video made following the survey by
then-chief executive Paul Foster, where he says “what was going in our
business ... shamed me”. He calls for an end to outdated “banter”. The
Irish Times has also seen internal emails from senior staff that refer
to poor work culture on the site.
Sellafield
said this week it had worked hard to address work culture issues since
2018 and does not tolerate bad behaviour. Yet a former HR consultant who
was brought in to help address issues within the company, Alison
McDermott, was sacked by the company in 2018 shortly after raising
concerns. She later took a whistleblower case against the company and
sued it at an employment tribunal, but lost. She is now being pursued
for huge costs related to her action against the company.
McDermott
spoke at a conference last year in which she insisted “there were
really serious and systemic issues around bullying and harassment” at
Sellafield, which had the effect of making the nuclear site more
dangerous. She spoke publicly of one young graduate who was allegedly
told by a rogue staff member that she needed a “corrective rape”.
Sellafield
insists “there is no place” for any harassment or bullying on the site
and urges anyone with evidence of it to come forward.
The
company also says it is being open about the nuclear leaks and has a
plan to manage them. Irish State officials got a tour of Sellafield in
July 2022 and 2023, and are expected to visit again this year. When
asked whether it had concerns following the recent reports of cyber
hacking, the Department of the Environment says it is satisfied it is
being kept up to date.
Minister
for the Environment Eamon Ryan has told the Dáil there are currently
no concerns about Sellafield from the Republic. The Environmental
Protection Agency says it believes risks to the State are “negligible”.
Dorfman,
meanwhile, says he is struggling to get the RPAC radiation protection
committee, which is composed of Irish- and UK-based advisers, to show
any interest in discussing issues at Sellafield.
“This
is one of the most dangerous sites in the world. That is not a
question, it is a fact. It is critical that RPAC puts it back on the
Irish agenda.”
A
potential long-term solution is to bury Sellafield’s nuclear waste for
thousands of years deep underground in bunkers beneath hard rock,
although one industry cynic remarked that this would end the need for
the lucrative disbursal of so much UK taxpayers’ cash on handling it on
the surface.
Sellafield
said work to find a community willing to accept such a “geological
disposal facility” is ongoing, and suggested Cumbria could yet be an
option.
The litany of debates about Sellafield could last almost as long as some of its radioactivity.
