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Fuel fabrication facility hits decommissioning milestone
Sellafield Ltd has hit a milestone towards decommissioning a redundant fuel manufacturing plant, which produced fuel for the Prototype Fast Reactor, located at Dounreay in the north of Scotland
Construction on the Prototype Fast Reactor began in 1966 and in parallel a Prototype Fast Reactor fabrication facility was built at Sellafield in order to provide fuel for the new reactor. The fabrication facility operated from 1971 – 1992, during which time it manufactured much of the 42tes of MOX fuel burnt in the Prototype Fast Reactor.
The two story building consisted of process equipment housed in high integrity gloveboxes, to provide containment during the fuel manufacturing process. The process feed material was made into fuel pellets, which were loaded into fuel pins and then assembled into MOX fuel elements.
Decommissioning started in 1994 and has involved the removal of 57 gloveboxes which have been size reduced and disposed of, resulting in over five thousand 200 litre waste drums being filled. The building is now an empty shell. The final phase of decommissioning involving isolating and decommissioning the building ventilation will commence in 2020, after which the plan is that the building will be demolished.
Richard Edmondson, Operations Manager said: “The experience and lessons learned from reducing the hazard in the fuel manufacturing facility will be invaluable in supporting future decommissioning work at Sellafield.”
Steve Laughlin, Prototype Fast Reactor Decommissioning Project Manager said: “This has been a demanding project resulting in a major hazard reduction for Sellafield. There have been challenges involving remote working, criticality control and contamination containment.”
The Prototype Fast Reactor was originally designed as the forerunner to a large–output commercial reactor and supplied 600 million units of electricity to the national grid. However a decision was taken to stop funding for the research reactor and it was closed in 1994.
