A £100 million ($124 million), 350-metric-ton silo emptying plant is now in place at the Sellafield nuclear site, the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority announced Tuesday.
The system will be used to extract radioactive waste from the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo, a storage facility built in the 1960s that is known as one of the most hazardous buildings in western Europe. The facility contains 10,000 cubic meters of intermediate-level waste originating from the U.K.’s commercial nuclear industry. The silo accepted waste from U.K. nuclear stations until it closed in June 2000.
“This is an enormous step forward for the Sellafield decommissioning programme,” NDA Chief Executive John Clarke said in a statement. “It is the culmination of 20 years of work to get to the position where we’ve got the first machine in place that will retrieve waste from these silos.”
After the material is removed from the silo, it will be packaged into nuclear skips and transported to modern waste stores at Sellafield ahead of development of the U.K.’s Geological Disposal Facility. The machines will start operations in 2018, according to the announcement, and will take about 20 to 25 years to complete the material removal.
