BNFL's Oxide Fuels Complex — the benchmark for the millennium

摘要

BNFL's Fuel Division has recently brought onto line a £200 million oxide fuels plant built to standards of automation and of radiological protection that have challenged the rest of the world. The plant will also have major environmental benefits, as it will allow five older manufacturing units on the site at Springfields, near Preston, to be successively withdrawn from service. The plant employs innovative technologies for materials processing, for product handling and for inspection and residue recovery. A state-of-the-art supervisory control and information system, with on-line diagnostics, allows for high equipment utilization as well as highly accurate product tracking. The complex has been designed to be capable of producing advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) fuel as well as many types of fuel for light water reactors (LWRs) with lower manning levels and at greater process yields than ever before. Starting with an overview of the philosophy of the plant, this paper moves on to cover in detail one of the many noteworthy features of this new complex, namely the ability of the plant to be able to handle uranic material recovered from a fuel reprocessing operation.