At Dounreay, left to right, Laurie Judd, Director, Technology and International Programs, Longenecker & Associates; Stacy Charboneau, Associate Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Field Operations, EM; Mike Brown, Strategy and Implementation Manager, NDA; John Mathieson, Head of International Relations, NDA; Jack Craig, Manager, SRS; David Lowe, Deputy Managing Director, Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd.; and Benjamin Rivera, International Program Liaison, EM.
At Sellafield, left to right, Stacy Charboneau, Associate Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Field Operations, EM; Jack Craig, Manager, SRS; Laurie Judd, Director, Technology and International Programs, Longenecker & Associates; John Mathieson, Head of International Relations, NDA; and Benjamin Rivera, International Program Liaison, EM.
Officials from EM headquarters and Savannah River Site (SRS) visited the United Kingdom’s Sellafield and Dounreay sites this summer to explore how the U.S. and U.K. can benefit from sharing expertise in nuclear waste cleanup to reduce costs, improve safety and increase efficiency.
Stacy Charboneau, EM Associate Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Field Operations, and SRS Manager Jack Craig gained insight into Sellafield’s highest priority cleanup efforts: the Legacy Ponds and Silos Program, comprised of four main plants once used to store waste and spent fuel prior to reprocessing — the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond, Pile Fuel Storage Pond, Pile Fuel Cladding Silo and Magnox Swarf Storage Silos.
“I have been impressed by the progress being made at both Sellafield and Dounreay. The complexity of the cleanup is similar to DOE’s even though the sites are much smaller in area. It is clear that DOE and NDA have a lot to learn from one another as we go forward,” Charboneau said, referring to the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which is responsible for the decommissioning and cleanup of the UK’s civil nuclear legacy.
EM’s visit was under the auspices of the Statement of Intent (SOI) between DOE, NDA, and the U.K. National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL). The SOI has led to information exchange among these organizations and has demonstrated that collaboration can result in safer, more cost-effective and faster cleanup of legacy waste.
In their latest meetings, EM and NDA officials discussed the NDA’s novel “G6 Approach,” which has helped NDA accelerate the pace of cleanup and save hundreds of millions of dollars since its inception in 2014.
The visitors toured NNL’s Central Laboratory, which is a newly commissioned hot cell suite for the safe handling of highly radioactive materials. They also visited the full-scale Vitrification Test Rig, which optimizes the processing of high-level waste into a stabilized form suitable for long-term storage; and the inactive large-scale test facility in Workington used to demonstrate new technologies, such as robotic systems.
At Dounreay, the group learned about the remediation of the Dounreay Shaft, a 200-foot-deep tunnel used to store nuclear materials in the 1950s and 1960s; the Waste Receipt, Assay, Characterization and Supercompaction area, used for packaging low-level waste for storage; and the Prototype and Dounreay fast reactors, where the visitors considered decommissioning challenges.
The U.K. visit by Charboneau and Craig comes four months after NDA CEO John Clarke and Sellafield Programme Director Pete Lutwyche visited DOE headquarters and the Hanford and Savannah River sites.