Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones Sellafield Ltd is to use Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs in "routine, business-as-usual operations" amid the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of the notorious UK nuclear site. Plans for day-to-day use of the mechanical quadrupeds were disclosed in a case study detailing the trial of the technology over the last few years …
Detecting radiation is trivially easy. Even back then, Geiger counters weren't terribly hard to get. A cover up, as soon as public interest is raised, would be exceedingly difficult to maintain for any length of time. Covering up anything going on today would be impossible in anything but a totalitarian state; the gizmo anyone needs to blow the cover is 50 bucks on Amazon. It seems far more likely, though admittedly less interesting, that there's no cover up to begin with.
The Windscale fire was publicly acknowledged. Lots of testing was done, and monitoring put in place thereafter. Local milk production was halted for a while - again all publicly.
Admittedly one of the things they discovered from the monitoring was that the fire hadn't actually released a huge amount of contamination, and much of the nuclear contamination they were finding around the site was actually from previous operations. The two reactors were directly air cooled, and had very rudimentary filters on the air blown out of them. If I recall the documentaries I've watched on this (back in the days when the Beeb did good science documentaries), this was covered up, and everything was blamed on the fire. But monitoring was put in place so they could catch new sources of contamination.
At the time they were certainly "economical with the actualité" partly from institutional practice and partly because this was a nuclear weapons project.
Yes, unbelievably, the reactors were air-cooled, with the original design envisaging direct venting to the atmosphere. At a late stage, Director John Cockcroft insisted that high-performance filters were fitted on the chimneys, at some expense and initially referred to as "Cockcroft's Folly". They were clearly visible towards the top of the stacks.
The choice to have filters very likely made the 1957 disaster "not great, but not terrible". It is estimated they caught 95% of the particulate exhaust from the fire.
To quote Manchester University "Had they not been built, it is no exaggeration to suggest that a large part of the surrounding area – including the Lake District – might be inaccessible today. "
The two original reactors were solely for the creation of materials for the construction of atom bombs.
They were air cooled nuclear piles using a graphite moderator. The moderators efficiency reduces over time but could be restored by annealing it (getting it hot), so at regular intervals they turned off the cooling air and let the pile heat up, then turned the cooling air back on and restarted operations. One day they left the cooling off too long and the graphite got really hot. On turning the air back on the graphite started to burn and then it was FUBAR. At one point during the recovery they took the access covers off and sprayed water directly on the graphite. The graphite was really hot by this point and it could have split the water in to hydrogen and oxygen that would then recombine in an explosion that would have taken the top off the reactor containment vessel.
The first power station at the site, Calder Hall, was also part of the atomic weapon program and so spent significant time not generating power but being used to create materials for the atom and H bomb projects.
Red Ted,
Calder Hall. Now there's another cover-up!
The Queen went to officially open the plant for the TV cameras. She pressed a big button to switch the reactor on, and then a big dial moved to show all the lovely electricity that was being fed to the grid. Of course, reactors don't start up quite like that, you have to run around shouting things, filling out health&safety forms and make the appropriate sacrifices to Vulcan before hitting the real big-red-button... So instead, a fake button was installed for Her Maj, and a fake dial, operated by string, was installed to show the leccy being generated.
...spent significant time not generating power but being used to create materials for the atom and H bomb projects.
Well, sort of both at once. To get the best quantity and quality of enrichable spent fuel you have to remove it from the reactor when it's only about 60% spent which you'd not do if you were only interested in generating electricity. Also early extraction and enrichment creates far more hard to handle waste than using the fuel to it's full potential.
Calder Hall where it was said: "Electricity too cheap to meter", unsurprisingly that got abandoned pretty quickly but rest assured, if fusion ever becomes a viable reality, some idiot will spout the same old crap.
VoT isn't even a good troll*, he/she/it tries but mainly fails with posts that can be relatively easy to disprove.
Weirdly I've up voted a couple of VoT's posts recently, not sure what that shows, maybe VoT posts a reasonable comment now and again to throw us off the trolling.
*I'm terrible at trolling when I've tried, I can't keep up the pretence and end up exposing my nonsense.
It only became "duct tape" because Duck tape was (and is) a brand name. IIRC, whilst there's various antecedents going back to the earliest days of adhesive tapes, the term duck tape came into everyday vocabulary after it was widely used on stores packaging in WW2, and the combination of strength, good adhesion and (somewhat) waterproofing was recognised as suitable for other uses.
… on hearing the news that THORP (Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant) at Sellafield had started operation, But, as I was about to leave the UK, at least I could console myself that it wouldn't be my taxes keeping the place running — robot dogs and all, as it turns out — for the rest of my life.
An interesting side effect of the 1957 Windscale / Sellafield leak was that an amateur inventor in Southern England was having difficulty calibrating his latest device. Unknown to him, he'd detected the leak.
The inventor was, of course, James Lovelock, who subsequently went on to develop the GAIA hypothesis.
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