Dounreay Site Completion Pushed Out Four Years After Additional Scope Added

The completion date of cleanup work at Scotland’s Dounreay site has been pushed out four years to 2029 due to added scope, including the removal of all nuclear fuels. The cleanup, managed since 2012 by a team of Cavendish, CH2M Hill and URS had been scheduled for completion between 2022 and 2025. While plans for spent fuel at Dounreay originally called for storing the fuel on site, it is now slated for transfer to Sellafield by the new 2029 completion date. “The new plan will also reduce the overall risk profile of the site when all the nuclear fuels are consolidated from Dounreay to Sellafield,” according to a Nuclear Decommissioning Authority release. “As a result of an additional £50 million ($78 million) of funding the NDA has released to Dounreay, this will all be achieved without major disruption to the workforce or supply chain.” 

 

The NDA emphasized that “this revised end date is still nine years earlier than the previous contract’s end date of 2038 and has the additional advantage that the site will at that date be free of all nuclear fuels – decades earlier than previous planning assumptions.”