Latest news
Decommissioning looks to the future
The future looks bright for Sellafield Ltd employee Heather Moore, originally an engineering apprentice at GlaxoSmithKline, who has become a key player in formulating the future decommissioning strategies at Sellafield.
The New Year saw a giant step forward in the working relationship between Sellafield Ltd and the Dalton Institute of the University of Manchester (UoM), as Heather embarked on a UoM PhD degree in Decommissioning Modelling.
Heather, from the Decommissioning Technical team will be undertaking research into a new type of decommissioning business model in support of future decommissioning and the overall Site strategy.
The evolution of current and future technologies used to decommission the facilities at Sellafield is being led by Dr Steve Hepworth, Manager of the Decommissioning Technical team. To achieve this successfully partnerships between Decommissioning, academia and the supply chain, will be vital, and Heather’s work will play a key role in their development.
The new business model Heather will be researching stems from an idea formulated by Professor Bernard Kelly, the Chair in Nuclear Decommissioning Engineering from the University of Manchester. The idea is to create a model which can be used for the entire decommissioning process on the Sellafield site. The process will generate outputs to show schedule, cost, resources required, waste etc.
Dr Paul Mort, Head of Decommissioning Support, further explained. He said: “A model of this kind is required to link together known and assumed decommissioning data in order to predict the downstream effects over time on such outputs as cost, waste volumes and resource requirements.”
