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The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. In comparison, consider how different the world looked a mere 7,000 years ago, when a determined pedestrian could set out from the Humber estuary, in northern England, and walk across to the Netherlands and then to Norway. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age. We sweltered even before we put on heavy boots and overalls to visit the reprocessing plant, where, until the previous day, technicians had culled uranium and plutonium out of spent fuel. Every second, on each of the plant’s four floors, I heard a beep – a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. “We’ve got folks here who joined at 18 and have been here more than 40 years, working only in this building,” said Lisa Dixon, an operations manager.
"As soon as you build the dam, or enlarge a dam, you have less water because you get evaporation. Out of Burrendong the evaporation is about 10 per cent of the water so immediately you get less water for a dam. "We can't be trying to squeeze every drop of water out of these rivers for developing and abstracting that water for irrigation." Rigney is also critical of how water is allocated in the Murray-Darling Basin. Grant Rigney is a Ngarrindjeri man and chair of Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations .
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M1 Abrams main battle tanks, which weigh 70 tons, are so heavy that they are usually sent to Europe, South Korea, and elsewhere by ship, and that takes about two weeks, not including the time to get the tanks on and off ships, Milley said. Milley talked to Task & Purpose at Saturday’s Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia about how the Army needs to have a vehicle that is light enough to be flown into combat zones to support infantry units. "We will go back into a dry period at some point and with water in the storages, things are very well placed to be able to manage through the first part of that dry cycle." "Communities are under a lot of pressure at the moment, there's going to be a period of recovery … but certainly with the volumes of water held in storage, there will be a couple of years with very strong allocations to entitlements. Adelaide water consultant Dr Erin Smith is more optimistic about how Australia is responding to the dramatic changes to water supply. "While you've got the same available water determination allocation policy, all that's going to happen is irrigation will have more water allocated to it because the town volumes are pretty well fixed.
"What used to happen is we used to get quite frequent high bounces and really low bounces … and in those high bounces, the biodiversity would have taken off, and would have had enough to respond and wait for the next big boom period. Kingsford uses the analogy of a bouncing ball to describe the way the river would oscillate between dry and wet. "There's no doubt that this flood will be fantastic for future generations. The question is how much of a bounce has happened." "We have an obligation to make sure that our future generations have something to springboard off, and at this present moment they are not going to have that."
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These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time. On the other hand, high-level waste – the byproduct of reprocessing – is so radioactive that its containers will give off heat for thousands of years. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human.
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. It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. An older reprocessing plant on site earned £9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas.
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The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access.
I kept being told, at Sellafield, that science is still trying to rectify the decisions made in undue haste three-quarters of a century ago. Many of the earliest structures here, said Dan Bowman, the head of operations at one of Sellafield’s two waste storage ponds, “weren’t even built with decommissioning in mind”. Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is a place where multiple time spans – some fleeting, some cosmic – drift in and out of view. Laid out over six square kilometres, Sellafield is like a small town, with nearly a thousand buildings, its own roads and even a rail siding – all owned by the government, and requiring security clearance to visit.
‘I’m about to die’ — Former Army paratrooper describes surviving a jump with a broken parachute
The laser can slice through inches-thick steel, sparks flaring from the spot where the beam blisters the metal. If Philip K Dick designed your nightmares, the laser snake would haunt them. Queen Elizabeth II at the opening ceremony of the Windscale nuclear power station, later known as Sellafield, in 1956.
It all put me in mind of a man who’d made a house of ice in deepest winter but now senses spring around the corner, and must move his furniture out before it all melts and collapses around him. The last drought broke all the records and future inflows have consequently been downgraded. But heat, drought and floods continue to break records as climate change intensifies. Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridge’s length off Finland’s south-west coast. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. In a van, we went down a steep, dark ramp for a quarter of an hour until we reached Onkalo’s lowest level, and here I caught the acrid odour of a closed space in which heavy machinery has run for a long time.
The spot where we stood on the road, he said, “is probably the most hazardous place in Europe”. Stack Exchange network consists of 181 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. TASK TOOLS provides quality products, exceptional customer service, award-winning packaging & merchandising, and the industry’s best warranty support to hardware and building supply retailers across North America. Provides quality products, exceptional customer service, award-winning packaging & merchandising, and the industry’s best warranty support to hardware and building supply retailers across North America. Task & Purpose Deputy Editor James Clark spoke with Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the Army’s Mobile Protected Firepower vehicles at the Dec. 10, 2022 Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. At 38 tons, MPF vehicles are designed to be light enough so that two can fit on an Air Force C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft.
Hall says he's watched the landscape change over the decades influenced by upstream developments, dams and climate change. F you take the cosmic view of Sellafield, the superannuated nuclear facility in north-west England, its story began long before the Earth took shape. About 9bn years ago, tens of thousands of giant stars ran out of fuel, collapsed upon themselves, and then exploded.
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