The first civilian spacewalk

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Hello, and welcome to BBC Inside Science.

I'm Victoria Gill.

The hatch is built in.

SpaceX copies hatch open.

Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do, but from here,

Earth sure looks like a perfect world.

And what a spectacular view they had.

That's the sound of civilians stepping out into the vacuum of space for the very first time.

All eyes were on businessman Jared Isaacman and fellow private astronaut Sarah Gillis as they ventured outside of a SpaceX capsule.

So, is this an historic space exploration milestone or just a very exciting holiday for a billionaire?

We'll be finding out much more later from the BBC's own expert space watcher, Jonathan Amos.

But first.

Today we are going inside one of the world's most hazardous nuclear sites, Sellerfield in Cumbria.

The sound you can hear is the alarm system inside the fuel handling plant where rods of spent nuclear fuel from our nuclear power stations arrive to be stored.

It's a pretty menacing soundtrack, but it's actually a constant signal that means everything is operating as it should be.

You only have to worry if it falls silent.

Sellerfield processes and stores more radioactive material per square metre than any other site in Europe.

And it's getting full.

This radioactive material, some of which remains hazardous for thousands of years, needs a new home.

So today we'll find out how the UK plans to lock away its nuclear waste permanently and the science of why it needs such special treatment.

And if we bury that toxic waste deep underground, how can we warn future generations of the dangers?

But let's go inside Sellerfield now and hear that reassuring sound again.

So we've had a month of security vetting, full change of clothes, including steel toe-capped safety boots and even safety socks.

And we're about to go into the fuel handling plant.

From a brightly lit corridor, we walk through several security doors into a vast cavernous industrial hall.

At the center, there's a building within this building where no people are allowed.

This is where the rods of spent nuclear fuel are extracted from heavy shielded steel canisters that they arrived in.

So these walls are they're a metre thick.

Our guide Billy Simpson explains how the robotic arms that are carrying out that extraction inside the facility are controlled from behind windows.

The operators are using what look like large retro game controllers.

The glass has lead inside of it to help with the radiation.

It's all controlled by the operator with the two joysticks.

It's all very tactile.

The containers of spent fuel are then moved to indoor cooling ponds where they're submerged.

We can look down on them from a high gantry.

This is the first place that the used nuclear fuel comes to, these giant ponds.

It stays here for 180 days, cooling and the water acts as a kind of radiation shield.

But we still can't stay here very long because it is elevated radiation up here.

We leave the fuel handling plant and the strangely dystopian sound of the everything is okay alarm to visit a building where some much older nuclear waste is housed.

Sellerfield's nuclear facilities are now in the process of being dismantled, so the contaminated material from them has to be stored here too.

This is a heavily shielded concrete store.

I'm standing inside a modern waste silo with Roddy Miller, who's Sellerfield's operations director.

The dosimeters we're wearing occasionally chirp as they measure the dose of radiation we're getting from the large concrete boxes of contaminated metal that are carefully stacked in here.

We've got over a hundred boxes and they contain intermediate level waste.

One building here from one reactor.

Yes, it was a small reactor, so we're talking the tens of thousands of boxes like this.

So

tens of thousands of boxes like this and we're in the process of retrieving that material from the old silos and ponds that stored that material for many years and putting that into modern, safe and secure storage.

And we'll be dealing with that for a number of decades to come.

Our program at Selffield in total is more than 100 years into the future.

We'll only see a fraction of this site.

It's an industrial nuclear town.

More than a thousand buildings connected by 25 miles of road.

It operates 24 hours a day and employs more than 11,000 people.

Its job is complicated and hazardous, a cleanup and storage operation dealing with radioactive material on an aging site.

One of its oldest nuclear waste silos that's used to store metal casings from fuel rods has been leaking radioactive liquid into the ground since 2019.

And there have been questions raised more recently about its cyber security and working practices.

But even if the site was operating without any problems, it is filling up with nuclear waste.

Alison Ahmit is head of retrievals here.

As you can see, the site's very congested, so if we don't have a permanent solution for the waste, we could run out of space on the site for building interim storage facilities.

We are planning for some of our what we class as interim stores to be here for 50, 60 years.

That's how long it will take to find a site for and build an underground facility to contain our radioactive waste permanently.

Until then, Sellerfield has to keep operating.

To find out about the permanent plan for our nuclear waste, I spoke to Professor Claire Corkhill, whose research is focused on understanding this material and how to store it safely.

So, right at the beginning of Sellerfield's life, the purpose of that site was to create plutonium to make weapons.

We're talking way back in the Cold War here.

And so, the race really was to make as much plutonium as possible.

And really, the waste was a complete afterthought.

So, at times, you know, it just got put in temporary facilities or, you know, it wasn't recorded properly.

So we didn't really know what went into what kind of skip or so on.

And now we're trying to work out what they are, how hazardous they are, and that makes it really challenging to clean it up.

And there's different types of nuclear waste.

But, you know, just so we can get a grip on what this material is and why it's so hazardous, let's talk about that spent fuel, which is...

I guess the most hazardous high-level waste.

What is it?

Why is it so hazardous?

The spent fuel are pellets of nuclear nuclear fuel that have been used inside the nuclear reactor.

And they're black, they kind of look like very big vitamin tablets if you want to visualize them.

They're mainly uranium, so 95% uranium and 1% plutonium, and the remainder is what we call fission products.

And those are the atoms that remain after the uranium has split into smaller atoms to create heat to generate electricity.

But these smaller atoms, they're also inherently unstable from an atomic point of view, which means that that they emit energy or radiation as a result of the instability.

And it's these fission products that really are the most hazardous part of the radioactive waste because they emit quite high energy radioactivity which can be penetrating and through human bodies and therefore cause problems to DNA.

So how is this material made safe for storage?

How do you stabilise it and get it boxed up and shielded for storage in the long term?

The first thing that we do is to cool that fuel when it comes from the reactor, and this is because that radioactivity being emitted from the fission product creates a lot of heat.

And we cool it in essentially giant swimming pools.

It stays there for several years.

Some of the problems we have at Sellerfield is because they left the fuel in the pools for too long and it started to corrode.

But what we do these days is to cool it for a short amount of time and eventually it will then be moved to a specialist storage facility.

And so this brings us on to the long-term plan and it is extremely long-term.

You think, you know, Sellerfield sort of started its life in the 40s and we're talking a thousand years to, you know, a couple of hundred thousand years.

What is the plan for keeping that material stored and safe and away from people for that length of time?

Yeah, it's a really challenging one and a lot of different options have been considered, including blasting it into space and so on.

But really,

the most technologically sound option that we have is to bury it deep underground.

And I quite like this concept.

If you think about it, we mine uranium from deep underground, and that uranium has been stable there for billions of years.

So it just makes perfect sense for us to return the waste back down to the same kind of geological environment.

Finding a site for doing that has to be found now.

So scientists and the government has to prove that that is a safe plan for the communities where this site might be built.

So, how on earth do we prove that something will be safe and contained for thousands of years?

It's such a great question because, you know, as a scientist, I can't say hand on heart that I can prove that these materials are going to be safe over the time scales that I'm working with.

Unless I have a time machine, I can't fast forward and see that what we're building has definitely worked.

And I don't mean to say that to make people afraid.

What we can do is to undertake experiments to give us a very high level of confidence that the approach that we're taking will be as safe as possible.

So for example, a lot of the experiments I perform in my lab at the University of Bristol are leaching studies.

So we take pieces of radioactive waste, immerse them in groundwater, and we monitor how the radioactive elements leach out.

And we try to then make predictions on how these waste forms will behave.

And of course, it's not just the spent fuel, is it?

We have all of this other waste, anything that's been in contact with that nuclear fuel and is contaminated.

So, what research are you doing now to understand how to make all of that waste material safer?

Yeah, so at the moment, the baseline treatment plan for a lot of that material is to put it into drums and fill those drums with cement.

And whilst that makes a safe waste form, what it means is that you increase the amount of waste because you're adding volume.

And this is a problem at Sellerfield because there's a limited amount of space to store waste.

So one of the things that we're looking at is what we call thermal treatment, and that means turning those wastes into a glass.

How does that work?

Well, there's multiple different ways that you can do it, but the most simple is a big one metre cubed box, and we fill that box with bits and pieces of waste.

We add some glass all crushed up, put in a couple of electrodes, and then run a current through them.

And that essentially melts all of the materials and ultimately forms a glass.

That's a very simplified version of how that works.

The signs are really good at the moment.

We can make some really nice glass waste forms that are much smaller in volume than the cemented counterparts.

Fascinating and

it's sort of baking it into the glass, melting it in there rather than just adding another material to it to pack it into a solid.

Absolutely.

So think of those radioactive elements I was telling you about earlier.

They actually get locked up inside the structure of the glass.

And you can think of this a bit like if you have a beer bottle, they're usually green or brown or something.

The colour comes from an element like iron or chromium.

And the reason it has a colour is because those elements are locked up into the structure of the glass.

And essentially, we're doing the same thing with radioactive wasting glass.

We're just locking it into the structure and really binding it so that it stays stable for really long periods of time.

And the idea with

a geological disposal facility is close it off for eons.

And we're going to be talking to somebody in a moment about how you put a warning message on that for future civilizations that may not have any knowledge of the language we speak.

What do you think about that?

How can you put a sort of eon-proof warning on this facility?

This is a really fascinating topic.

So, the example I like to give is around the Egyptian pyramids.

So, absolutely covered in hieroglyphs, saying very clearly in the language of the time, do not enter or you will be cursed.

And the archaeologists of the time who discovered them said, Oh, these are interesting markings.

Let's Let's go in and see what we can find.

So, in a sense, marking those pyramids invited curiosity.

So, perhaps marking is not a way forward.

But one of my favourites is around the colour-changing cats.

And this is the idea that you could genetically breed cats to change colour when they come into contact with radioactivity, which I think is a really neat idea.

But the problem with this is, again with leaving any marker that has any language on it, is how do you know what colour the cat is supposed to be when it's in contact with radioactivity?

No one's going to leave you the key, presumably, to understand whether a red cat is good or a black cat is bad.

So there are some really interesting ideas out there on how you might go about marking the facility.

I have got to say I did not expect that conversation about nuclear waste to pivot to colour changing cats.

But thank you, Claire Corkhill, who is Professor of Mineralogy and Radioactive Waste Management at the University of Bristol.

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Now, have a listen to this.

Once a geologist and structural engineers have selected a site that will withstand earthquakes and outbast ice ages,

once the machines have dug deep down into the earth,

once the waste has been capsulated in cast iron, bentonite clay and copper backfilled and concreted over,

Then, somehow, we must find a way of reaching across the vast abyss of time to say,

don't dig here.

That is an eerie snippet from a new BBC Radio 4 drama, Half Lives, and it poses a fascinating and complex question.

If nuclear waste that's buried far beneath the earth is hazardous for tens of thousands of years, how do we create a warning, a message we can design now that can be understood in the far future?

I'm joined now by Professor Ellie Carpenter, who is thinking about exactly that.

Hello, Ellie, welcome to Inside Science.

Hello, hello, and thanks for having me.

Oh, you are very welcome.

Thanks for joining us.

This is a mind-boggling question to think about,

but you are thinking about it.

Why?

Well, I'm a curator and I work with contemporary artists who are investigating different nuclear issues, different sites and concepts.

And I think everyone is kind of perplexed and troubled by this challenge to communicate to future generations about the dangers of radioactive waste sites.

And why can't we just write a warning, leave a radioactivity sign on there and say, do not dig nuclear waste here?

Well, because it's probably be moved away.

You don't know where that sign will go, and you don't know if people will read it in the future.

So it needs to go beyond language and the symbolism we understand today, things like yellow as a radioactive warning colour, that might not be understandable by future civilizations.

Exactly.

It has to be embedded within culture and recorded in many, many different ways.

In the 1980s, Thomas Sebiok, who was a semiotician, wrote a paper for the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation and the Human Interference Task Force in America.

And the aim of the task force was to prevent human interference with geologic disposal facilities really to warn people not to mine or drill at that site unless they're aware of their actions and aware of what they're doing so this raises the question about how you communicate into the future and the The question is how you have ideas that are distributed and networked, indexical, iconic and symbolic, that have lots and lots of different ways of communicating and communicate both locally and on a national and international level.

You talked about symbolism and kind of transcending cultures.

I guess I think about things like cave art or hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt.

You know, what are some examples of messaging that does transcend civilizations in this way?

Well, that's a great question because I've just come back from the northern territory of Australia and I've been visiting communities and different rock art sites and looking at paintings around uranium mining sites, the proposed Jabaluka mine that has just been prevented from going ahead and one of the ways in which those mining projects have been stopped is through the Indigenous storytelling that goes back 60,000 years and they warn people not to dig, not to disturb the land.

What do some of these stories look like?

It's an oral storytelling tradition and there's also a painting tradition.

So there is a rock art painting called Mia Mia or sickness or sickness country.

And this is an old painting in red ochre of a figure, a stick figure.

It's very clearly a human being.

But the joints of the human are swollen with sickness.

Wow.

And there are many different interpretations of these paintings, but the most compelling and the one that's discussed most locally is that if you dig up the uranium in the area or if you dig the land in the area, it will make you sick.

How fascinating.

So we have a lot to learn about this messaging from indigenous cultures who pass on these stories from generation to generation over such long periods of time.

What's being considered at the moment when developing this new messaging for this buried hazardous waste?

Well, it's interesting that the European directive on this is about marking sites post-closure.

But the current debate amongst the industry and also amongst artists is that's too late.

These sites take over a hundred years to find a site, to agree a site, to build and then to be operational.

By which point, all of this kind of knowledge and interest and energy may well have lost focus.

And what's really important is that we start to try out these relay processes now so that we know how to communicate into the future.

Some Biops' idea was to have an atomic priesthood.

I don't know if you heard about the atomic priesthood.

I haven't.

What is the atomic priesthood?

So, this is one of the options, one of the possibilities for how we communicate this.

Well, it was an idea that we could create a religion that would carry on knowledge over generations to warn people away from these sites.

But, of course, a priesthood, it's very male, it's very hierarchical, it's very linear.

And if we look to Aboriginal culture, it's very networked, it's much more sustainable.

Wow, so the examples of how we might do this aren't just painting a picture, writing a message, the creation of a religion even to kind of pass this knowledge down.

What other examples have you seen of how we get across this kind of civilization cultural barrier with this messaging?

Well, artists are making all sorts of projects and there are literally hundreds of artists working on this around the world.

But a couple that I've worked with are Eric Berger and Mariquito who have a beautiful project called Inheritance where they've designed a necklace that's made out of naturally occurring radioactive stones and the necklace is designed to be inherited through the generations of a family.

So it's a very intimate project.

It's not about a public landmark site.

It's about a very delicate, beautiful thing that you pass on from one generation.

And each time you pass it on, you have to measure it and see if it's safe to wear.

And you learn how long this radioactivity is persistent for.

Thank you very much, Professor Ellie Carpenter from UMIU School of Architecture in Sweden.

And the BBC Radio 4 drama Half-Lives will be broadcast at 2.15pm on Tuesday, the 17th of September.

But we don't just look to the future here on BBC Inside Science.

We are very much about the here and now.

So if you have any burning science questions for us to answer, please do send them in to insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

Now, let's move from ominous underground warnings and look upwards because the first privately funded spacewalk took place today.

It is another billionaires in space milestone with SpaceX's Polaris dawn mission, which blasted off on Tuesday.

But two of the crew were non-professional astronauts who made history when they stepped outside of the capsule just after midday.

I'm joined in the studio by BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos.

Hi, John.

Hey.

I mean, how significant is this?

Is this just a, you know, when I hear about Elon Musk's adventures in space, I do sort of think, oh, here we go again.

But I mean, this was, I mean, the pictures were incredible.

Pictures were spectacular.

Yeah.

They really were.

Is there much new here?

Not a massive amount.

on one level but this is not really about today this is about the future and what spacex have done here is they've developed a space suit within a very short space of time, within a few years.

You know, this project was announced two and a half years ago.

They've done a successful spacewalk today.

But one of the key things that they have been talking about, and I found this very interesting, they're looking at a suit that is manufacturable at scale.

Right.

So it's great to be able to build a Lamborghini.

But you're not going to really push forward space exploration of every space suit is Lamborghini, takes that long, costs that much.

You need a Ford Escort space suit that is functional, that does the job and can be manufactured at scale.

And that's what SpaceX think they're doing here and that is what is new.

Meaning more people can go on space walking.

More people can go on.

Does that just mean holidays in space for those who can afford it?

All of that kind of thing, but if you're going to have

lots of people on the surface of the moon, if you, I mean, yeah, who knows whether this will happen.

Elon Musk is constantly talking about cities on Mars

you're gonna need lots of spacesuits and that that is Elon Musk's plan that is that is his plan he's got this big new rocket that he calls Starship you know he says he's gonna launch a hundred people at the time they're gonna need spacesuits and if as I say every spacesuit takes as long as it does to make a Rolls-Royce and costs as much as a Rolls-Royce, that's not going to happen.

And it looked really smooth.

It looked good.

They seem to have a little bit of difficulty opening the hatch, but SpaceX

will be pleased.

But there's other big, big news this week, John.

You have been a familiar voice on Inside Science and a friend and colleague of mine my entire BBC life.

And you are leaving the BBC after 38 years

covering the science beat.

Can I put you on the spot?

If I can hold it together, this is a big day.

What have been your most memorable science moments?

It's really difficult.

You know, I've been in the room for really extraordinary moments.

You know, the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars is one that will stick with me for a long time because there was a huge amount of jeopardy for that.

I remember particularly the New Horizons probe when it passed Pluto.

I mean, Pluto was a real unknown, and we got these fabulous pictures of the mountains and these glacial fields on Pluto.

That was extraordinary.

But you know, I might take you back to one of the very first science reporting assignments that I had, which would have been back in about

86 or 87.

And I got

to meet a man called Greg Winter at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

And he just managed to humanize monoclonal antibodies, MABS.

You see that.

MAB thing on the back of lots of drugs now, treating, you know, even Alzheimer's, as I understand, but cancer, autoimmune diseases,

absolutely

extraordinary targeted protein therapies.

And back then,

they weren't working so well because they were made in rodents.

Obviously a rodent antibody, the human immune system goes, that's not quite right.

So

these therapies were very inefficient.

And he managed to humanize them.

He made changes that these molecules then appeared as though they were human when they were put in the human body.

And that really exploded the whole field.

It blew me away.

And I hadn't had an enormous amount of science education at that stage.

And

so it was a road to Damascus moment for me.

You don't just do space.

You've been there for kind of health revolutionary moments.

You know, I was in the room for the announcement of the draft of the human genome.

So there's been all sorts of things, right?

But

that moment blew me away.

And I enrolled with the Open University, one of the great institutions in this country, to do the sciences.

And the rest is history, as they say.

So for me personally, I am here today because of that reporting assignment.

Greg Winter, as you probably know, went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2018 extraordinarily, not just for that moment, that breakthrough that he had then, but for later development work in that field.

So thank you, Greg Winter.

I did have a very embarrassed conversation with him a number of of years ago when I said thank you and well you know it's it's like a swifty meeting Taylor Swift.

You're a bit lost for words right but

yeah that's that's kind of where it where it started.

Probably met a lot of your heroes over the years.

I have to say one of one of my favorite happy moments was tagging along with you on

covering the InSight NASA mission in Pasadena.

And we went out for a beer with the engineering crew that night and one of the team came up to both of us, threw her arms around me and shouted, we're on Mars, and then downed a beer.

And it was, that was a lot of fun.

It was a lot of fun to cover the science, but it was a lot of fun to go to the pub with them afterwards.

And always a joy to hang out with you, John.

I will miss you hugely.

Thank you so much for your insights, your enthusiasm and your friendship over the years.

Don't be a stranger, please.

I won't be a stranger.

And as Jonathan Amos leaves the building, that is all we have time for this week.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Sophie Ormiston and Jerry Holt.

Technical production was by Kath McGee.

Next week, I will be on a scientific culinary quest, finding out how meat that's grown not in an animal, but in a laboratory could change the way we eat.

Until then, thanks for listening and bye-bye.

At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

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Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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