Latest news
World first for Sellafield's Floc Retrieval Plant
In a world-leading decomissioning project at Sellafield, British Nuclear Group has pumped hundreds of cubic metres of radioactive waste from a tank where it has been stored for the last fifty years. It is the latest stage in a project several years in the planning and one which will take a further twelve years to fully complete, when the radioactive waste from all six tanks in the Primary Sludge complex will have been removed and processed.
The sludge resulted from the historic treatment of liquid effluents before they were discharged to sea. The Primary Sludge tanks began operations in the early 1950’s and operated until Sellafield’s Enhanced Actinide Removal Plant (EARP) came on stream in the 1990’s. The sludge from the first tank has now been safely transferred to a high integrity buffer tank built to modern engineering standards in preparation for phased treatment through EARP and encapsulation in cement as intermediate-level waste.
Emptying all six tanks will mean that detailed plans for the final decommissioning of the whole building can be made. The success of this stage has proved the process to continue to empty the remaining five tanks. Processing the sludge from all six tanks will take approximately twelve years.
The successful transfer has moved half of the total radiological inventory of the tank complex to the new buffer tank, and represents a significant contribution to meeting the sludge retrieval target for the whole of the Sellafield site.
