multi-storied #25: The million-year project
The logistics of getting into Sellafield, a nuclear facility in northwestern England, are both bureaucratic and sartorial. I applied for a media visit permit some time in the summer of 2021, and then I had to undergo a background check, presumably to ensure that I was no terrorist. The process oozed along for the better part of a year before my permit materialised. Then, at Sellafield itself, I felt like I spent as much time changing in and out of hard hat-overalls-radiation badge-boots as I did touring the buildings themselves. The days I was there were the hottest that England has ever experienced, and the press officer was very solicitous, asking often if I felt dehydrated. They allowed me one particular kindness. In some buildings we visited, beards are usually forbidden, because in the event of an emergency, respirators or other kinds of masks tend to fit badly over facial hair. Happily, Sellafield didn’t force me to shave.
The article I wrote for the Guardian Long read turned out to be a fine illustration of the importance of what journalists call “the angle.” Sellafield has been documented extensively, after all. The daily press has covered its life span in full; Marilynne Robinson wrote a book about it while she was on sabbatical in England; there’s a sprawling oral history project called Sellafield Stories. Even in the years I was on this assignment, there appeared a BBC documentary and a Granta piece on a sister nuclear facility. Sellafield’s history and its precarity and its past accidents and even its decommissioning (which was my ostensible subject) had all been covered. What could I possibly add to this? Sometimes I feel this longform writing thing is all about reading everything that has already been written in order to work out what else is left to say—and if that’s worth saying at all.
Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. Which was just as well, because I’d gone to Sellafield not to observe how it lived but to understand how it is preparing for its end. Sellafield’s waste – spent fuel rods, scraps of metal, radioactive liquids, a miscellany of other debris – is parked in concrete silos, artificial ponds and sealed buildings. Some of these structures are growing, in the industry’s parlance, “intolerable”, atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water.
To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. The best way to neutralise its threat is to move it into a subterranean vault, of the kind the UK plans to build later this century. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn.
To anyone whose jaw drops readily at the outrageous possibilities of engineering, Sellafield is like a theme park. In short order, I learned about:
A snake that fires lasers, and that can enter irradiated cells and cut metal up
A robot dog that trots around rooms too hot for humans to enter, to scope out radiation levels and perform other tasks
A machine the size of a studio apartment that glides along on rails, perches above silos filled with nuclear waste, and extracts pieces of waste the way we manipulate those claws in soft-toy-filled booths at arcades
The practice of vitrifying the worst kind of waste—sealing it into glass with the help of a little Tate & Lyle sugar
A plan to dig a half-mile chute underground, somewhere in the UK, in which nuclear waste can eventually be disposed permanently. I visited a site of this kind in Finland, below the birches of an island called Olkiluoto. In total, it will cost 5.5 billion Euros, and is designed to be safe for a million years.
More than anything else, though, Sellafield felt like a vortex of time: a place where all manner of timescales slipped and slid and clashed with each other. This is true, admittedly, of every place on the planet. One friend, a nuclear physicist, read a draft of this piece and told me he wasn’t a fan of the opening, in which I make a big deal about the Earth’s uranium being born in stars 9 billion years ago. Come on, he said, every chemical element has that kind of cosmic history.
He was right, of course. But Sellafield does make you dwell on these durations of time in a way that your local coffee shop or train station do not. Your barista or conductor are not working with materials whose effects last hundreds of thousands of years, the way radioactivity does. They are not actively planning projects to last a million years. And they aren’t trying to clean up messes made by poor policies implemented three-quarters of a century ago. More than in most other places, people at Sellafield are required to bend their minds around deep time. They’re trying very hard, very sincerely. But I was struck by the idea that we, as a species, just aren’t capable of reckoning properly with those vast scales of time. And that perhaps our honest incapacity to do so is behind our monumental bad decisions—decisions like tipping irradiated metal into open pools of water, as was done for decades at Sellafield, but also like burning coal and oil for energy. We never see far enough into the future as we need to see.
Much, much more on all of this in my full piece: “Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site”