Workers have cut the first of six planned holes in the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo, a nuclear waste storage facility at the United Kingdom’s Sellafield site, the U.K. National Decommissioning Authority announced Tuesday.
The holes will be the means by which the waste material will be extracted from the silo on its way to permanent disposal.
Commissioned in 1952, the facility holds over 3,200 cubic meters of intermediate-level radioactive waste – specifically, metal-tube parts that were employed for uranium fuel rods installed in early nuclear reactors in the United Kingdom. The silo has been closed off to access for 65 years, according to an NDA press release.
Several years of preparations led to the first hole, including a practice cut on a full-scale replica in Scotland. The project involves a system called the Retrievals Access Penetration (RAP) rig, which slices into a segment of the wall and removes it in once piece, depositing the section into a containment bag. Containment doors will be placed on all the holes until waste removal can begin.
Ultimately, all six of the facility’s compartments will have a hole for waste removal due to begin in 2019. Cranes equipped with grabbers will extract the material, then place it in a metal box for storage.
“The level of challenge involved with this facility is unparalleled, considering the age of the building, the lack of historical information about the waste itself, the atmosphere inside the silo and its position on one of the most congested sites, anywhere in the world,” Steven Carroll, head of the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo, said in the release.
Sellafield Ltd., which is managing the overall cleanup of the site, is conducting the hole project in cooperation with Bechtel Cavendish Nuclear Solutions and Babcock Marine Technology.
