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Geoff’s idea lets the cat out of the bag!
An ingenious idea involving cat litter could potentially save Sellafield Ltd up to £100,000 while also earning Sellafield Ltd employee, Geoff Thomas, a Suggestion Scheme award.
Multi Element Bottles (MEBs) which weigh around three tonnes each are used to hold Light Water Reactor (LWR) spent fuel assemblies which are then placed in transport flasks and sent to Sellafield for reprocessing. On arrival, the MEBs are removed from the flask and transferred to a storage pond.
Once the fuel has been removed, the MEBs are then exported from the storage ponds and placed in ISO-freight containers, before being sent to the MEB store.
There is always a potential risk that some residual pond water may remain in the MEBs which needs to be absorbed. Previously, chalk blocks were placed on the base of the containers to soak up water, but these are both expensive and fragile.
Geoff, the MEB export team leader, came up with a rather cunning, feline solution.
“Vermiculite – cat litter to you and I – has exactly the right absorbent quality to do the job. It’s also cheap, easy to source and has none of the handling problems of the delicate clay blocks” he explains.
“The absorbent blocks we used to use were like handling soap bubbles and trying not to burst them, so there used to be lots of wastage when they broke. We really only used them because we had always been used and no one questioned why.
“The use of Vermiculite means we save almost £200 per ISO freight container because it only costs £4.99 per bag and can be spread in less then 10 minutes. Previously we needed 20 chalk blocks costing £9.62 each and it took an hour to install them.”
Stuart MacVean, Spent Fuel Management Director commended Geoff’s suggestion stating: “Each and every saving we can find is vitally important to the business. More money can be directed at the high hazard clean-up work to meet the lifecycle baseline that we have committed to.”
In addition to Geoff’s suggestion which will ultimately reduce the costs associated with the MEB exports programme, significant progress is also being made in the decontamination trials currently underway, which will provide a long term solution for the eventual treatment and disposal of the MEBs.
Trials on four MEBs which commenced in March this year have been looking at ways to treat them – including high pressure water jetting. Residual activity monitoring confirmed an almost 70 per cent reduction in internal activity levels. However, further, larger trials are scheduled to begin during October 2010.
