Along with other businesses, Sellafield Ltd are keen to do all that it can to support doctors, nurses and care workers to respond safely. To help, Sellafield are providing personal protective equipment (PPE), where they can, to priorities established by the Cumbria Resilience Forum. A Sellafield Ltd spokesman said: “Initially, we are donating items including 2,500 disposable respirators; around 500 suits, gowns and lab coats and several hundred pairs of gloves.

NW Evening Mail 30th March 2020 read more »

The Dounreay site poses some longstanding high-security waste problems. Hazardous radioactive acids awaiting cementation are top of the to-do list, but the long wait has had positive aspects. Professionals familiar with nuclear, particularly experimental or reprocessing sites, will know these complex old sites have a variety of challenges as wastes are created by decommissioning and legacy wastes are treated for storage or disposal. Storage facilities deteriorate over time, making progress on waste immobilisation more important. The operational and decommissioning waste streams in the UK nuclear waste inventory show just how complex the task of dealing with legacy wastes is. It is possible to deal with these wastes, but only with the correct funding, impetus and management. The question of whether to treat a waste on site or to transport it elsewhere can often be as much of a political or management decision as a technical or regulatory one. Dounreay, in northern Scotland, is one such decommissioning site with a variety of lower and higher activity solid and liquid waste streams. Dounreay was the UK’s flagship fast reactor development site and was the location for a materials test reactor (MTR), the experimental Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR), and the larger-scale Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR). There have been successes in waste management in recent times. They include dealing with volatile liquid metal coolant, isolating the site’s underground waste shaft from the environment and dismantling many old plants. Currently work is under way to extract failed fuel elements from the DFR.

Nuclear Engineering International 25th March 2020 read more »

The deep borehole concept is relatively simple and has been around since the 1950s. Rather than excavate one enormous mine like Yucca Mountain to store all US civilian nuclear waste, this solution would involve depositing nuclear waste in hundreds of narrow holes drilled into the earth’s crust. The idea has plenty of boosters, among them a start-up called Deep Isolation, based in Berkeley, California. Founded by physicist Richard Muller and his daughter Elizabeth Muller, the company launched a Series A investment round earlier this year on the promise that it can bring the borehole concept to fruition. By leveraging the lateral drilling technology developed for tapping into shale gas deposits, the company that professes to be the “SpaceX” of nuclear waste claims to have hacked a solution for the permanent disposal of the United States’ 82,000 metric ton inventory of commercially-generated spent nuclear fuel. Unfortunately, the proposal is full of holes. By pledging to streamline the process of disposing spent nuclear fuel, Deep Isolation has already amassed over $14 million in venture capital. To save nuclear plants from shipping their waste to a centralized repository 2,000 miles away, the company conceives to bury the waste more or less on-site at each power plant in nearly horizontal underground holes. Even though hundreds of boreholes will be required to house the nation’s spent fuel inventory, this option is said to be inexpensive, relative to Yucca Mountain. Deep Isolation cites a lower-limit cost of $2 million to drill one hole but suggests that the approach will save money overall by eliminating things like further interim waste storage, transportation, and much of the necessary construction workforce. Confronted with an economies-of-scale argument that would favor a few, large-capacity facilities, the company markets its approach as “modular,” so that the revenue generated from the completion of one easily-replicated, generic borehole can finance the development of subsequent boreholes.

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 26th March 2020 read more »

Opportunities to provide services in relation to evaluation of possible sites for geological disposal facilities (GDFs) for radioactive waste will become available later this year. Procurement will be via a framework agreement with lots, the value of which will amount to approximately £16.5M. Time frame is five years, possibly leading to a further similar period. The contracting authority will be Radioactive Waste management (RWM), based in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Publication of the contract notice should appear on 17 July 2020. Potential sites to be examined are situated in England and/or Wales. RWA published a report on how it will evaluate sites for new GDFs last month, as was reported by NCE’s sister paper Ground Engineering. This concluded GDFs will only be built where there is a willing community and a suitable site for the development. The RWM said it would use six ‘siting factors’ to inform the conversations it will have with communities over site suitability.

New Civil Engineer 27th March 2020 read more »

Since the global outbreak of COVID-19, Sellafield Ltd says it has taken some precautionary actions at its site in north-west England, including the controlled shutdown of the Magnox Reprocessing Plant. The reprocessing plant is approaching its 60th year and is a complex chemical facility designed to process and separate plutonium and uranium. The Magnox plant is to close permanently this year. It began reprocessing used fuel from Britain’s first nuclear reactors in 1964 to separate the uranium and plutonium, which can still be reused. Turning the facility off quickly in a response to reduced manning could create unnecessary maintenance or repair work, the company said, whereas a controlled shutdown leaves the plant in the optimum condition to be restarted.

World Nuclear News 23rd March 2020 read more »