Sellafield's Nuclear Safety Failings Panorama

Tonight on Panorama -

Serious safety concerns at Britain's most hazardous

nuclear facility revealed by the people who were in charge.

It's a race against the clock. It's a ticking clock.

Someday, that clock's going to run out and there'll be a problem.

We'll show how years of neglect have left parts of Sellafield

rundown and vulnerable.

It was just not up to standard.

It was like... It was a different world to me.

A nuclear site where there aren't

always enough workers to meet minimum safety levels...

It defies belief, actually,

that anything could be working at below safe staffing levels.

..where radioactive plutonium and uranium are stored in

degrading plastic bottles...

This stuff should have been kept in a very, very safe place,

because it was very dangerous.

The organisation is now focusing on putting right some

underinvestments of the past.

..and where insiders fear a serious accident.

If there's a fire there, it could generate

a plume of radiological waste that will go across Western Europe.

Sellafield is officially

Britain's most hazardous nuclear site.

Almost all of our nuclear waste comes here and stays here.

Some of the material will be dangerous for hundreds of

thousands of years.

You'd expect day to day safety to be beyond reproach.

You'd be wrong.

I arrived thinking there would be a level of excellence, a level

of engineering competence far exceeding anything I'd seen before.

But it became fairly evident that all those things were not there.

This man helped run some of Sellafield's

most important nuclear facilities.

Now he's turned whistleblower.

Were you ever worried about what you saw? Every day. Why?

Ultimately, I think something will happen there.

There will be an omission or somebody will die.

We've also seen hundreds of documents from 2012 to

earlier this year that showed the reality of life inside Sellafield.

In this programme, we will show you safety problem after safety

problem here at Sellafield.

Now, each is shocking in its own right, but taken together,

they paint a frightening picture of the way this place is run.

Sellafield is not a power station.

It stores and re-processors nuclear waste.

A lot of what happens here is very complicated.

But some of the problems we've found are pretty basic.

Take staffing levels.

Many of the plants on the site need a minimum number of workers on

shift just to keep them safe.

But we've discovered that parts of Sellafield can't even manage that.

How dangerous is below minimum safety?

If you had an incident,

you would not be able to react to it accordingly.

So if something went wrong, you couldn't deal with it? Yeah.

So on those days, it's just luck that something didn't go wrong.

Correct.

Now, minimum safe manning levels can

apply to teams as well as whole plants.

They are a long way below normal staffing levels.

If a plant has say 60 workers, the minimum might be just six.

Our leaked documents from 2012 and 2013 show minimum levels

were routinely breached.

One month, it happened 19 times.

It is incredible.

It defies belief, actually,

that anything could be working at below safe staffing levels.

I think that falls squarely with management,

because how could that be allowed to happen?

There is no excuse.

The leaked documents say any deviation from the safe

minimum manning levels is not acceptable.

Sellafield says the situation has improved.

But minimum safety levels are still

being breached on average once a week.

What happens, then? If you haven't got enough people, what do you do?

I mean, you make alternative arrangements.

So the things that have to be done get done and facilities are

shut down if in fact we are not able to operate them in the way

that we want to.

What do you think about the fact

that it's at a level that's dangerous?

It's not at a level that's dangerous.

Below minimum standards is dangerous, isn't it? No, it is not.

Why is it listed as below minimum standards, then? It's below minimum.

Well, you have a standard and report on it,

but the important thing is the plant managers are able to take

other steps in order to maintain safe operations at all times.

Our whistleblower was concerned about another very basic

safety failing. Sellafield has thousands of sensors and alarms.

He says when he was there,

staff frequently reset alarms without investigating the cause.

What are these alarms drawing attention to?

It could be a door has been opened, a fire door, fairly benign,

right up to getting a leakage of effluent.

But which alarm is important?

You kind of lose sense of which are the important ones and which

are the not-so-important ones.

So they get reset.

Just reset? Yeah.

ALARM

And we've seen a report that shows alarms were being ignored at

several of Sellafield's nuclear facilities.

Two plants had an unacceptable rate of alarms,

more than 1,000 going off every day.

Sellafield says the report was about software-based alarms,

rather than the hardwired alarms that are important for safety.

And the government body responsible for Sellafield says there

isn't a problem.

Our whistleblower says that because there are so many alarms,

that they are just reset almost immediately. No.

There is not a problem with alarms being ignored.

How can you be so sure?

Because we keep a constant surveillance on what is

happening on alarms across the piece. We carry out investigations.

Sellafield carries out investigations,

the regulator carries out investigations.

There are examples where the number of alarms that people are

responding to is large. I think that was his point.

Those alarms are promptly responded to, is my point.

We've also discovered that liquid containing radioactive

plutonium and uranium is being stored in thousands of

plastic bottles in a laboratory fume cupboard.

The bottles were only designed for temporary storage and

some were degrading.

Sellafield has been working for years to remove them.

But right now, on the site, there are more than 2,000 plastic

bottles containing plutonium and uranium.

There was a period a number of years ago in one of the facilities

where some waste materials were being stored broadly in the

way you described.

We've been working to get that material into proper storage.

This stuff should have been kept in a very, very safe place,

because it was very dangerous, and it was placed in

a plastic container which was degrading in a cupboard.

What does that tell us about the way this place is run?

It says that the organisation is now focusing on putting right

some underinvestments of the past in order to support the hazard

reduction mission that the site has. And so that's what we're doing.

Sellafield later told us that any plutonium and uranium samples

are kept securely, and that to imply that such material is

inappropriately managed is simply not true.

Many of Sellafield's problems date back decades.

In 2008, the government tried to sort them out.

It awarded the contract to run Sellafield to an American-led

consortium, Nuclear Management Partners, or NMP.

Now, many of the problems we're showing were happening while

NNP was in charge.

But for the first time,

some of the Americans who managed the site have agreed to speak.

They say they had

no idea just how bad Sellafield was before they took over.

Our site managers were saying, "I've never seen anything like this.

"We've got to get it fixed."

What sort of state was the infrastructure like at Sellafield?

Very poor.

Very poor.

I can tell you that there are very hazardous materials there,

as you know, and there were situations where facilities

or equipment were on the verge of breaking down.

The condition of the facility and equipment was below what they

had understood it to be. It wasn't up to standard.

They were far behind best practice.

Could it have continued as it was?

I would not have allowed it to continue.

Without sounding too dramatic, this is a race against the clock.

It is a ticking clock, OK?

Someday, that clock's going to run out and there'll be a problem.

NMP says safety and performance at

Sellafield improved across the board.

But our whistleblower says parts of the infrastructure were still

seriously rundown.

Each plant has got a number of complicated systems that are

keeping you safe -

electrical systems, ventilation systems, power distribution systems.

The hard infrastructure, the pipework, the bridges,

most of this was built 50s, 60s, 70s,

and the maintenance really wasn't there to stop it failing.

We've obtained a report written by NMP in 2013.

It used these pictures to show just how rundown the site had become.

The report says years of neglect had led to intolerable conditions.

And minutes of a safety committee highlight failures in the

supplies of water, electricity, and other essential services.

Now, Sellafield says things have improved.

But at a nuclear facility, these basics can't be allowed to fail.

What do you think of a place like Sellafield having poor

electricity supply, poor steam supply?

It's not acceptable.

There is no other way to say it. It wasn't acceptable.

What we've been told is that it's dangerously rundown.

We've seen reports that talk of years of neglect,

intolerable conditions.

That doesn't sound safe, does it?

Well, I don't accept the wording that's used.

Which bit of the wording? Well, dangerously rundown.

I don't accept that. Years of neglect, intolerable conditions?

There are elements that are run down.

There are elements that are classed as intolerable under the HSE's

definition of intolerable, which means -

it is not a natural language definition of the intolerable -

what it means is that you must spend money to improve it,

and that's what we're doing.

So what are the risks if the infrastructure's faulty?

Well, we've been able to piece together the events from

November 2013, when Sellafield's

poor condition led to a serious incident.

An electricity substation has been badly wired,

and at ten to seven that morning..

EXPLOSION

..it blows.

ALARM

Some of these site's nuclear facilities lose power.

Part of an emergency safety system also fails.

In one of the treatment plants, an evacuation begins.

The power cut means the ventilation systems stopped working.

Radioactive dust is spreading through parts of the building.

An internal report said it was believed to be the worst

level of contamination in this plant's history.

It took a year to make safe.

But there is a second part to this story.

A week later, the American consortium's top managers

appeared before Parliament.

Sellafield's then managing director Tony Price was asked about the leak.

But he didn't tell MPs about how serious the situation was.

To be clear, the workers were wearing special suits and

respirators. That's not the impression I got in committee.

He assured me it was all fine.

It was a whole year before things were fine.

Well, that's misleading Parliament. That's a very serious matter.

I'm just gobsmacked, really, that someone could come and tell

me something that just was patently not the case.

Sellafield later wrote to the committee twice with

clarification about the incident.

But MPs weren't given the complete picture for another 15 months.

Do you understand why people might get nervous that very senior

figures at Sellafield seemed to be not entirely straight with

something like Parliament?

Well, if that were true, then of course I would understand that.

Well, in what way is it not true?

Where am I getting this wrong?

He said that things were back to normal.

It took a year for things to go back to normal,

and that's what he told parliament.

What had returned within a few days was the normal electrical

supplies, the normal ventilation, and what have you.

The production capability of that one line did not return back

into availability for the 12 months.

So say we're on the parliamentary committee now,

and I'm asking you, four days after the event,

"Are things back to normal?" What would you say to me?

Well, that's completely hypothetical.

I don't know what I would say.

I think the answer is no, isn't it? It took a year to clean up.

Well... Let's cut to the chase here.

It looks, doesn't it, like he wasn't being straight?

There's no way that gentleman was spinning the story.

NMP told us that at the time of the hearing, Mr Price could not

have possibly known the full extent of the problem.

It said the safety and security of Sellafield have always been

the overriding priorities, and that over the past eight years,

the site achieved the best overall safety in its history.

Sellafield admits that some areas of the site currently pose an

intolerable risk.

One of the worst is an old concrete storage pond.

Radioactive waste was dumped here for more than 50 years.

These are old, decrepit structures,

holding quite a large quantity of nuclear waste.

And it's quite worrying to see that things haven't moved on quick

enough to get that waste out

and put it somewhere safer.

As this footage shows, the bottom of the pond is covered in sediment.

The nuclear waste has corroded to form a radioactive sludge.

Now, Sellafield has started to remove it,

but internal documents say the pond has numerous cracks.

Some are seeping.

There were some hundreds of cracks.

Some of which were showing detectable leakage either by

radiation measurement or by seeing fluids.

It doesn't mean that all of a sudden,

the pond was going to empty out into the ground.

With continued neglect, nobody doing anything,

we repaired the major leak area already but absent that,

and continuing degradation, sooner or later, there will be

a big crack, a big leak, and then there's going to be battle stations.

It was a different world for me.

And not a good one? Not a good one.

Not a good one. It was not...

It was not up to commercial nuclear standards and... Erm...

It was just not up to standard.

Experts say it is unlikely the pond will collapse. But it's possible.

And that could mean radiation spreading beyond Sellafield.

If the pond was to catastrophically collapse,

and water was to drain down, this type of fuel burns in air.

If it burns, it means particles are dispersed into the atmosphere, so

you'd be in a situation where you'd be in the laps of the gods here.

Would it go out to sea? Would it go inland?

Would a deposit on a village or whatever?

It could be a significant radioactive plume maybe

stretching to 100 to 150km.

We've been told that there are hundreds of cracks.

Is that accurate?

Concrete structures have cracks in them and there are indeed

hundreds in the walls of that building.

But some are leaking?

There are a small number, a small proportion which are...

Do show signs of let's say seepage over the years.

And those are the ones that I monitor to establish that

there is no issue.

It's been said to us by several people that one of the

possibilities is if that pond leaks, it would create a fire.

The material in there is pyrophoric. It would burst into flames.

And that would create a very dangerous plume.

Is that something that you're concerned about?

I think that's a...

That particular scenario is very extreme.

But possible? Is very extreme.

All that is necessary to prevent that sort of fuel setting

fire is to keep it wet.

That's all that's necessary.

Another highly dangerous area of Sellafield is another old

nuclear waste dump.

This time, the waste is stored in silos in a concrete building.

They're built by people hastily in the 1950s because they needed

places to store these materials.

So these are not the kind of facilities that were intended

to hold waste for a long period of time.

The silos are now so degraded Sellafield says they too pose

an intolerable risk.

As this footage shows, they contain metal and other radioactive waste.

It's material that would burn on contact with air.

We've got a cleanup program involving one of these

facilities that's scheduled to take another 20 or 25 years.

We don't have a lot of confidence that building is going to

hold up another 20 or 25 years.

It doesn't mean we think it's going to fall down tomorrow.

But as time goes by, it gets worse.

The radioactive material shown in this Sellafield footage needs

to be removed before the silos degrade too far.

But we've discovered that Sellafield spent nine years and more

than ?200 million on a plan that was shelved.

It included a robotic arm that was supposed to reach inside and

retrieve the waste

but was never built.

A leaked report says poor leadership had allowed the project to

drift out of control.

What happened to that ?200 million?

The vast majority of the money that's been spent on that

project, the building of the superstructure,

the means of cutting holes,

the means of putting doors over the holes etc, will still be used.

The specific robotic arm won't be used,

because we've now got a better technology.

But that's completely different to saying that we've...

In your phrase wasted ?200 million.

I don't accept that at all.

But 11 years after work started,

Sellafield still hasn't removed any waste from this building.

If things do go wrong,

it's vital Sellafield can deal with an emergency.

The site has its own fire service.

In 2012, a report by the nuclear regulator said it does not

have the level of capability required to respond to the

nuclear emergencies effectively.

And a Sellafield report from 2013 says significant gaps exist

in all major aspects of emergency management.

Significant gaps exist in all major aspects of emergency planning?

This is not a very attractive picture, is it?

We've done a huge amount of work in recent years in order to

ensure that the fire and rescue services are in a position to

continue to support the site's safe operation.

We keep going through the different areas, sir, and you tell me that all

is well, so either I'm wrong every time, or you're slightly in denial?

We are absolutely not in denial.

Safety is our priority and we are managing a very complex site,

which has got a great deal of hazardous radioactive

materials on it, so these are not simple, straightforward decisions.

The last two and a half years have

seen significant improvements on the site.

We have put particular pressure on Sellafield to make

improvements in this area.

Those improvements are now by and large realised and we are

happy with the standards that the site's achieving.

But some parts of Sellafield are kept open even when everyone

agrees there are safety problems.

Take Magnox, one of the main reprocessing plants on the site.

In 2014, it marked its 50th anniversary.

This is a facility that has run safely for 50 years,

52,000 tonnes, and it's run safely in one of the heaviest,

most regulated industries in the world.

But a report from the nuclear regulator says

a few months earlier, there'd been an incident that could

potentially have been fatal for workers.

And then there was another incident that could have resulted in

a criticality, a nuclear reaction that could have killed someone.

But these warnings from the regulator are dismissed by

the government official in charge of Sellafield.

It says in the report that these were potentially fatal.

That someone's view. I don't accept that view.

So you'd don't accept reports, so what's the point in having

a report if it's investigated, it says it

is a potentially fatal incident, and you just dismiss that?

No, I'm not dismissing it. You just did. No, I didn't.

What I said is I disagree with an element of

a particularly emotive statement about near fatal.

I absolutely accept that there are elements in that which were not

as we wished them to be.

Actions have been taken to make sure that they've been improved.

A broader view was taken as to what was the right thing to do in

the best overall interests of safety on that site.

Over the following year,

there were two more serious safety failures at the Magnox plant.

The regulator published this extraordinary report.

It says it would normally consider

closure because of the safety problems.

But then it also says that that would lead to

a dangerous pileup of nuclear waste.

So although further breaches and safety are likely,

Magnox is allowed to carry on running.

If the plant wasn't safe,

we wouldn't have allowed it to continue operating.

But what we did was we made a balanced decision,

looking at the strengths and weaknesses that the plant

has and we felt that allowing continued operation under

close supervision was the right course of action.

Magnox is like much of the Sellafield site.

There are risks to keeping it open, but it's too important to close.

But if Sellafield can't be closed down,

no matter how poorly it performs, where does that leave me and you?

Where does it leave the general public? Well, paying the tag.

And that price tag keeps on rising.

Sellafield's main job, reprocessing,

is due to finish within four years.

But the cleanup may take 100 years.

We've now been told it could cost as much as ?162 billion.

It is unimaginable for most taxpayers, this amount of money.

It's enormous.

And they've got to just be really much more transparent about

how they're working out the costs.

It does feel like a blank cheque.

How much is this going to cost the nation, to clean up Sellafield?

Oh, I don't know.

There are financial projections over the planned period which goes

out more than 100 years.

They are simply projections.

The American consortium had been criticised over rising costs.

Its contract to run Sellafield was terminated in April.

The government says it wanted direct control,

and it insists Sellafield is safe.

So there are 10,000 people who work at Sellafield.

They all live in the local community.

I live two miles from the site.

There's no way that anybody like that, me or others,

would choose to live on the doorstep of something if we thought we were

putting ourselves and our communities at risk. No way at all.

So absolutely the site remains safe

today and it will remain safe tomorrow and it will remain

safe into the future.

But our whistleblower worries that safety is an ongoing and real risk.

What's the thing that most worries you about Sellafield?

It's the fire in one of the silos or one of the processing plants.

If there's a fire there, it could generate

a plume of radiological waste that will go across Western Europe.

This is the world's most complex nuclear facility.

But we have found poor management, rundown infrastructure,

and safety failings.

Sellafield - the nuclear site that struggles with the basics.

It's a real labour of love.

That's why we're giving you extra tips...

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It needs patience to get just right.