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Secret UK Uranium Components Plant Closed Over Safety Fears
Lasrick writes "The Guardian has an exclusive story regarding a secret uranium-enriching plant in the UK that was closed due to safety fears. From the article: 'A top-secret plant at Aldermaston that makes enriched uranium components for Britain's nuclear warheads and fuel for the Royal Navy's submarines has been shut down because corrosion has been discovered in its 'structural steelwork', the Guardian can reveal.
The closure has been endorsed by safety regulators who feared the building did not conform to the appropriate standards. The nuclear safety watchdog demands that such critical buildings are capable of withstanding 'extreme weather and seismic events,' and the plant at Aldermaston failed this test.
It has set a deadline of the end of the year for the problems to be fixed.'"
The AWE plant at Aldermaston is well signed from the road, and its website seems at least reasonably open about what it does:
Our role at AWE is to manufacture and sustain the warheads for the Trident system ... Our work at AWE covers the entire life cycle of nuclear warheads; from initial concept, assessment and design, through to component manufacture and assembly, in-service support, and finally decommissioning and disposal.
Sounds like the system is working as it is supposed to. Inspectors found problem, problem will be rectified.
Now had they not found anything, and it fell apart like that bridge a few years back, then that's news.
The facility doesn't sound terribly 'secret', not any more at least...
Sent from my PDP-11
FormerlySecret UK Uranium Components Plant Closed Over Safety Fears
This is not the same Secret Nuclear Bunker which is signposted nearby Brentwood. That is a totally separate formerly secret nuclear site.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Somebody get an Architect we need a new building.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
The AWE site at Aldermaston is enormous. It's an old airfield stuffed with big, nondescript buildings. Unless you're working on site you won't get within about half a mile of any of the 'interesting' ones and even when on site you won't know what's in most of them unless directly working there. I can well believe that they have a hidden enrichment plant.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
I read this -- it is a scam. They have not really closed the plant, they just erected some sort of social barrier to prevent humans from entering it to do whatever it is humans do there. The plant is presently doing what plants do when humans are not present, openly so. Everything is working as it should, as might be expected. Under this circumstance of the plant being unpopulated by humans, I mean.
I see this shoddiness everywhere these days. Absurd claims that something is closed when you could shove a stick right into it, or reach your arm right into it. If maths were done this way birds would fly backwards and farmers would be forced to grow smaller potatoes.
Now if they built a Sarcophagus around it then it would truly be closed. They may as well for it sounds like a dreary place of corroded steel and despite the excitement of it being somehow 'nuclear' there there is nothing interesting to see, no "Elephant's Foot" of molten corium or such-like.
Oh dear. It seems things are wearing out as fast as we are growing up.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
This is an example of the social headwinds nuclear engineering (actually any engineering) faces all the time. Engineers identify a problem, usually during routine inspections (inspections that take place in order to find any problems!), and take an action such as shutting down in a controlled manner to remedy the problem. The tabloid title of the summary of the event invariably reads "Nuclear Plant X Forced to Shut Down Due to Safety Fears" and is followed by an article which lists the last N times the plant had to shut down, possibly followed by a comment about TMI/Chernobyl/Fukushima just to keep the drama up. Yes, accidents happen, but the fact that many problems are identified, investigated, and remedied as part of a engineered safety response program seems lost on the public. The battery problems on the Boeing 787 are another similar example - correct actions are being taken to remedy a problem, but journalists are branding the Dreamliner as a potentially unsafe lemon.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Is it possible that these warheads can reach the USA?
Maybe. We'll have to strike pre-emptively.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
The nuclear safety watchdog demands that such critical buildings are capable of
I demand that people who write articles in newspapers be capable of writing proper English before getting their degree in journalism, let alone being hired by said newspapers.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash