100 down, 1,300 nuclear structures to go at Sellafield 01 May 2014

Sellafield has reached a new milestone – 100 buildings demolished at the historic nuclear site since 2007. The 100th demolition was a store.

Structures removed include legacy chemical plants, R&D facilities, waste stores and reactor cooling towers, through to portacabins and even the original site fire station.

"There are over 1,300 facilities at Sellafield to be decommissioned and reaching our first century is a significant achievement," states Steve Slater, head of decommissioning at Sellafield, adding that 35,000 square metres of real estate has been levelled.

"This space is necessary to fuel our continued decommissioning programme. We're using the extra room to help retrieve, process and re-package historic nuclear waste to make it safe for long term storage and disposal."

The job of decommissioning Sellafield is going to take more than 100 years.

Work is currently focused on projects where buildings are deteriorating and the nuclear waste is no longer stored to modern standards.

One of the most dramatic projects so far was the explosive demolition of the 88 metre-high concrete cooling towers associated with the world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall which ceased generation electricity in 2003.

Its four cooling towers were safely demolished in September 2007.

Sellafield's demolition team is now concentrating on developing plans to safely pull down the tallest remaining chimney on the Sellafield site.

The 61 metre-tall chimney sits on top of the 11-storey First Generation Reprocessing Plant and in total stands 122 metre high, just beating off competition for the tallest structure on the site.

This 1940s chimney has a stainless steel flue built within a concrete windshield and sits in the middle of one of the busiest parts of the Sellafield site.

A mini replica of chimney will be built to test the self-climbing platform which will bring the chimney down section by section.

Demolition work won't start until 2016, when the new active ventilation system is in place.

Brian Tinham

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