Taking up arms for decommissioning

摘要

The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has built and operated a wide range of nuclear facilities since the late 1940s. The UKAEA's mission is to restore the environment of its sites in a safe and secure manner, using currently available technology. This restoration includes the decommissioning of a number of redundant research and power reactors at five UK sites. At the Windscale site in Cumbria, the UKAEA and its contractors started ed a project in 1998 to remove the core and pressure vessel of the Wind-scale Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (WAGR). The project is currently in the eighth of ten 'campaigns' -the last of which is due to finish, within budget, in summer 2005 (see Table, p15). The principal technical difficulty associated with the removal of the activated components of the core and pressure vessel was that radiation dose rates of approximately 1Sv/h were anticipated in much of the reactor. In some cases this precluded manual dismantling operations and demanded the use of remotely operated equipment. In other areas, dismantling could be achieved by a combination of remote, semi-remote and manual operations.