The United Kingdom’s Sellafield nuclear site is resuming some cleanup operations and ramping up the number of on-site personnel, after two months of COVID-19 precautions.
Site operator Sellafield Ltd. in late March reducing staffing inside the fence from over 8,000 to roughly 1,500 “key workers,” according to a May 22 update. It hopes by the middle of June to double that count, with a maximum of 3,500 workers on-site “at any one time … to allow people to more readily socially distance themselves from other workers.”
“The preparations we have made in plants enable everyone to come back to work with confidence,” Chief Executive Martin Chown said in prepared comments. ”I was most impressed with the commitment and positive attitude from all of our staff, who are an asset to our business.”
Sellafield, in West Cumbria, for decades was a major location for the U.K.’s nuclear weapons and energy work. It is now approaching the end of its nuclear fuel reprocessing mission, while hosting a large-scale cleanup program.
In the week leading up to May 22, work resumed on three projects at Sellafield:
- Preparations resumed for commissioning the Silo Emptying Plant retrieval systems within the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo, which holds waste cladding material extracted from spent Magnox nuclear fuel.
- Workers are once again working on repackaging cans of plutonium within new containers.
- Maintenance is underway again on the skip-handler crane in Sellafield’s First Generation Magnox Storage Pond. A corresponding project is set to begin this week in the Pile Fuel Storage Pond.
