Engineering news
Engineers at Sellafield have removed 100 tonnes of contaminated redundant equipment from Europe's oldest fuel storage pond.
The 60-year-old pond, known as the Pile Fuel Storage Pond (PFSP), has to be emptied as part of a plan to clean up and decommission the oldest nuclear facilities in the UK. A further 650 tonnes of contaminated metal still needs to be retrieved from the pond.
The contaminated metal has been cleaned up for disposal in the national Low Level Waste Repository near Drigg, West Cumbria.
Derek Carlisle, PFSP head of projects said: “Sometimes it’s difficult to appreciate the decommissioning progress being made, because by the very nature of what we are doing things can take a long time and seem to cost a lot of money.
“However, when you think about 100 tonnes of equipment – the size of a whale or a Boeing 757 – it really does give you some scale as to the difficulty in removing that much mass from the biggest, and one of the oldest, nuclear storage ponds in the world.”
To date the retrievals programme has included: the removal of the very last remaining pile fuel decanner; recovery of two tall tools or masts - lifted from the pond and size reduced in situ; recovery of eight of the 30 waste and transport flasks; and stripping out and export of redundant metal structures above and below the water line in the pond bays.
The pond, the first at Sellafield, was initially constructed to store fuel from the Windscale Pile reactors, whose primary focus was producing plutonium for the UK’s nuclear deterrent. It stopped receiving fuel in the 1970s, but remains the largest open air nuclear storage pond in the world, at 100m long.
The PFSP contains more than 15,000m3 of radioactive water, more than 300m3 sludge, various nuclear wastes and legacy spent nuclear fuel in around what was originally 180 metal skips in the pond. It poses one of the most challenging decommissioning projects on the Sellafield site.
