Energy services multinational Wood said Monday it has won a contract to remove and process 47 cubic meters of radioactive waste from the retired Dungeness A nuclear power reactor at Kent in the United Kingdom.
The contract covers designing, building, and managing systems for retrieving the wet material, currently held in tanks at the facility, according to a Wood press release. The waste will subsequently be processed so it can be disposed of as low-level radioactive waste.
“We are looking forward to working with Magnox Ltd on this important project, which will help to fulfil the aims of the UK government’s Nuclear Sector Deal to make decommissioning faster, cheaper and safer,” Bob MacDonald, CEO of Wood Specialist Technical Solutions, said in the release.
Additional details of the contract were not immediately available. A spokesman for the Aberdeen, Scotland-based company did not respond to a query by deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
The Dungeness A reactor closed in 2006. It is now being decommissioned by Magnox Ltd., which in 2019 will transfer from privately operated Cavendish Fluor Partnership to the U.K. government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
Current decommissioning operations cover demolition of the plant’s turbine hall and decontamination of its storage ponds, according to Magnox Ltd. In its latest business plan, NDA said operations in the 2019-2020 fiscal year at Dungeness A would include cleaning and stabilization of the ponds, preparations for extracting the Boiler Annexe, and wrapping up bulk asbestos removal from the reactor structures.
The 20-hectare facility is scheduled to enter care and maintenance mode in 2025. Final site clearance would begin in 2087 and be completed a decade later, according to the business plan.
