Sellafield medical isotope plant decommissioned 02 April 2013

Sellafield has successfully decommissioned a long-redundant facility dating from the 1950s, built to manufacture radioactive sources for the medical industry to treat cancers.

The Caesium Extraction Plant (CEP) was built in 1951 (and operated until 1958) on top of a facility still used to store highly active residues. These liquors provided the feedstock for the process.

"This ends a 10 year programme of decommissioning, removing redundant plant and clearing what was a highly contaminated legacy facility," comments Andrew MacPherson, CEP delivery manager.

"It's also the first decommissioning project to be completed fully remotely on the Sellafield site," he adds.

The plant was made up of four rooms full of process vessels and pipework, furnaces and shielded tanks. It suffered several problems during operations so was shut down and partially cleaned out.

However, subsequent surveys showed that significant radioactive materials remained and that high radiation levels would prohibit manned entry.

Interestingly, the existing building structure was assessed as not sufficiently robust to withstand significant loading on either floor or roof, so a stand-alone 900 tonne decommissioning module was built alongside on rails to access all four areas of the CEP.

"The workforce successfully retrieved 16 tonnes of nuclear waste to decommission a facility that was never designed with decommissioning in mind," comments Steve Slater, head of decommissioning.

In fact, he says that engineers incorporated the learning from each phase of the project to develop tooling and techniques that have since been used to manage the waste items encountered.

The 10-year project was executed with a perfect safety record and Sellafield says it provides a benchmark for future remote decommissioning work.

"This is a significant step forward in our mission to reduce risk and hazard on the Sellafield site in accordance with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's (NDA) requirements," states Paul Foster, NMP executive director for Sellafield.

Brian Tinham

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