SELLAFIELD TOUTS MOVE THAT WILL SAVE £1 MILLION

Sellafield Limited announced yesterday that it expects to save £1 million by reusing fuel skips from another site to ship waste out of the Pile Fuel Storage Pond. Sellafield plans to reuse 42 Magnox skips from the Chapelcross Magnox reactor site that otherwise would have been disposed of. Sellafield believes it will save £580,000 by re-using the Magnox skips, which when factored in with the costs avoided by Chapelcross for disposal of the skips, brings total savings for the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to more than £1 million.

The Pilot Fuel Storage Pond stored and cooled used fuel from Sellafield’s Windscale reactors. PFSP waste manager Chris Mounsey explained the site’s plans. “At Sellafield, we’re working to recover 750 tonnes of radioactive metal wastes from the PFSP and need Magnox skips to firstly store and then to move the waste out of our historic fuel storage pond to downstream treatment plants,”Mounsey said in a statement. “In the past, we’ve ordered in brand new Magnox skips which were expensive at almost £14,000 each or we’ve sourced them from elsewhere on the Sellafield site, but we couldn’t get them in the timescales needed. So Chapelcross provided the ideal solution – they wanted to dispose of their skips and we wanted a cheaper source of skips – it’s a win-win for everyone.”