Vacuum found with Sellafield nuclear waste not meant to be opened

A vacuum cleaner was among radioactive waste retrieved from a nuclear store which was never intended to be reopened.

Sellafield’s Pile Fuel Cladding Silo has been a locked vault since waste stopped being tipped there in the 1970s.

The nuclear site, in Cumbria, said it had solved the “challenging puzzle” of how to take waste from a building designed never to be emptied, with 18 three-metre- cubed stainless steel boxes already filled with waste.

The Electrolux vacuum cleaner was believed to have been used to suck up radioactive dust during the facility’s operational life in the 1950s and 60s.

Roddy Miller, chief operating officer at Sellafield, said: “The vacuum cleaner is a great example of how challenging it is to clear this silo.

“We don’t know for sure what’s in there – they didn’t keep accurate records in those days.”

He also said anything taken into the building by the workforce during that time was likely to be contaminated.

“There was no alternative disposal route for contaminated material, so everything just went into the silo,” Mr Miller said.

A modern-day vacuum cleaner is also playing a part in the waste removal job, sucking up dust created when waste is dropped into storage boxes.

It will eventually be consigned as waste itself, joining its 1960s predecessor.

Sellafield is also emptying another silo and two ponds, which store used nuclear fuel underwater and were also not designed to ever be emptied.

Mr Miller said the clean-up operations represented an “important milestone” in the site’s decommissioning.