Workers have cut three of six planned holes in the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo, a nuclear waste storage facility at the United Kingdom’s Sellafield site, the U.K. National Decommissioning Authority announced Tuesday.
The holes will be the means by which the waste material will be extracted from the silo on its way to permanent disposal.
Commissioned in 1952, the facility holds over 3,200 cubic meters of intermediate-level radioactive waste – specifically, metal-tube parts that were employed for uranium fuel rods installed in early nuclear reactors in the United Kingdom. The silo has been closed off to access for 65 years, according to an NDA press release.
Several years of preparations led to the first hole, including a practice cut on a full-scale replica in Scotland. The project involves a system called the Retrievals Access Penetration (RAP) rig, which slices into a segment of the wall and removes it in once piece, depositing the section into a containment bag. Containment doors will be placed on all the holes until waste removal can begin.
Holes will be cut into all six of the facility’s compartments by the end of the year. Waste removal is hoped to begin in 2019, once the retrieval gear is ready and a new storage facility built at Sellafield to receive the material. The work will involve using cranes equipped with grabbers to extract the material, then place it in a metal box for storage. Currently scheduled for completion in 2030, site cleanup lead Sellafield Ltd. hopes to move that up by three years, spokeswoman Ruth Hutchison said by email Wednesday.
“The level of challenge involved with this facility is unparalleled, considering the age of the building, the lack of historical information about the waste itself, the atmosphere inside the silo and its position on one of the most congested sites, anywhere in the world,” Steven Carroll, head of the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo, said in the release.
The entire decommissioning of the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo is expected to cost £500 million ($655 million) – down from the 2013 projection of £900 million ($1.2 billion) thanks to “cheaper and more fit for purpose solutions,” Hutchison said.
Sellafield Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, is conducting the hole project in cooperation with Bechtel Cavendish Nuclear Solutions and Babcock Marine Technology.
This is one part of the massive, decades-long cleanup of the Sellafield site in Cumbria, a former nuclear-weapon complex that still conducts nuclear fuel reprocessing.
