nuclearfootprints

During my visit to the Idaho National Laboratory I wanted to meet with some people from their decommissioning and clean-up team to make comparisons between decommissioning in the UK and the US.

There are immediately visible differences if not purely from the amount of land that each has to work with. As an example, the UK’s largest nuclear site, Sellafield, sits on 262 hectares of land on the Irish Sea, INL sits on 870 square miles of land in the middle of the desert!

The US attitude was very relaxed and down to earth and the thought was very much along the lines of decommissioning being a relatively straight forward process with a few complications related to radioactivity.

Two reactors have been decommissioned to date, a third is in the process of decommissioning and fourth, the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II is in the planning stages.  As an example, one reactor took two years to decommission - around 14 months was spent removing all of the fixtures and fittings from the reactor building and the remainder was transporting the reactor to the disposal point and taking down the building. CH2M HILL is the contractor working with INL on decommissioning.

The team that is working on decommissioning and demolition is performing extremely well to date and are very creative in finding solutions.  They are repeatedly coming in ahead of time and under budget because of their creative outlook.  For example, a plan was in place to remove an 80 ton boron tank at Test Area North by getting two large cranes and lifting it off and transporting it to the disposal site.  Instead, one of the contractors suggested - “Why don’t we just pull it off?”  This was considered the better and much cheaper option so two dozer cabs were used, slings were attached to the dozer cabs and the boron tank and they simply pulled the tank off the roof onto a created elevated landing area.  This saved an estimated $375K.

In comparison to the UK’s decommissioning program, there are differences in regulation but more importantly, there are different risks associated with decommissioning purely because of the space available at INL. With around 870 square miles and a dedicated disposal area on site they have many more options available to them.  That, along with a very good, long-standing working relationship between the regulators and DOE personnel allows them to be creative in how they approach tasks.

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