£4.3m clean-up contract awarded
AN English company has just started work at Dounreay on what has been dubbed the world’s deepest nuclear clean-up job.
Oxford Technologies has landed a
£4.3 million three-year contract which marks the start of the process of emptying the notorious 65 metre deep shaft which served as a makeshift dump for a noxious mix of highly radioactive and chemical waste produced at the site over two decades until 1977.
Its staff have started design work to create a platform from which operators will remove the most heavy-duty contents from the un-lined vertical rock tunnel, which was created during the construction of the site.
The Abingdon based remote-handling firm beat off competition from a total of 19 bids to win the contract, which is the biggest in its history. It has hired eight people from across the globe to carry out the complex project of retrieving waste from the shaft, part of a multi-million pound programme, which has already seen a grout curtain being created to isolate it from the surrounding rocks.
Business development manager Stephen Sanders yesterday said the firm is in the process of designing a platform which will enable it to reach the bottom of the shaft and clean out the waste which will not be accessible to retrieve from the top.
He said the firm has worked with site licence company DSRL for a number of years, though this is by far its biggest job it has carried out on the site.
"We are in the process of creating a platform which will be used to lower down into the shaft to assist with cleaning it out," he said.
"A petal crane will be used to remove the majority of the waste, but that won’t get everything such as steel rods and concrete.
"The waste is complex and it consists of everything from plastic to tin, the platform will be able to reach the waste the crane can’t and will assist in the breaking down of large boulders and steel items.
"We are also creating a structure at the top of the shaft which will lower the platform."
Mr Sanders added: "We aim to have the project completed by 2017. We have taken on an extra six people to our additional staff, but eight in total will be involved in the project.
"This is the type of project which is difficult to recruit for due to the complex nature of the work and we have pulled in people from a wide area, not just in the UK but internationally."
The shaft was licensed as the disposal facility by the Scottish Office in 1958 and was used on a regular basis until 1977 when a chemical explosion ripped through it, blowing off its concrete lid and scattered low-level radioactivity around the entrance to the shaft.
An estimated 1500 tonnes of radioactive waste was consigned to the shaft and its replacement, the nearby silo, until disposals stopped in 1998. The clean-out of both facilities is a key part of the site closure contract awarded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to the Babcock-led CDP consortium in April 2012.
After the waste is removed in batches, it will be processed through new plants where it will be repackaged and put in specialist stores.