Pile Fuel Cladding Silo - Start of retrievals

[@benfowler1134]

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”. Respect!

[@robertchesney1592]

Very well done to all who were involved in the design and fabrication of this project and also to the operators now in charge of this phase of the process.

[@MrWylis]

Fantastic. Real progress and great collaboration.

[@johnhagen31]

That's a great achievement under complex and challenging circumstances. I'd like to see a report on the clean-up of B30, which must be one of the world's most dangerous legacy facilities.

[@neilhilton35]

This is a major milestone. To build, train and practice the operations off-site first is an excellent and safe approach prior to live operations on-site. New approaches can be applied to future decommissioning projects also.

[@derekp2674]

Thanks for sharing. It is really great to see that this project has progressed to the point of starting actual waste retrievals.

[@cle_roknn3742]

What exactly is this waste, it looks like possibly fuel rod/element pieces and random scrap metal????

[@the_retag]

As far as i understand the cladding (shell) from fuel rods of the original piles that were reprocessed

[@dsds3968]

Why does the aerial view have a blurred area?

[@Chiavaccio]

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏💯🥇🔝

[@MajorT0m]

What's the reason for the deletion of the comments?

[@christopherleubner6633]

The cladding is zirconium contaminated with a little bit of nuclear materials. Easiest solution would be to disolve the nuclear materials into an acid bath then recycle the zirconium to make new fuel pins. The slight amount of radiation added would not be a problem. Then the acid bath can be distilled off to yeild a much smaller volume of high level solid nuclear waste.

[@straightpipediesel]

It's not, it's magnesium. The Windscale pile and first-generation British reactors used a magnesium alloy cladding, hence the talk about argon purge at 1:51. The only reactor still running with magnesium cladding is in North Korea.

[@christopherleubner6633]

@@straightpipediesel yikes magnesium as the cladding, that's a bit dangerous 😳

[@aaroncosier735]

When a society creates a liability that their descendants will have to shoulder.....