Dounreay anniversary is celebration of legacy and global impact
Should the British taxpayer be joining the celebrations to mark this year’s 70th anniversary of Dounreay when it continues to pick up the costs of its protracted clean-up?
The question has been posed by Jake Hubbard, who has just moved up to start work as an environmental graduate at the site.
Speaking as a member of public at last week’s meeting of Dounreay Stakeholder Group, he said: “We’re celebrating 70 years when the decommissioning programme is dragging on much longer than planned.
“How would the public feel about celebrating its 100th or 125th anniversary?”
Dounreay NRS managing director Dave Wilson said the celebrations mark the historic role played by the site in developing fast reactors.
“We’re celebrating its legacy,” he said. “It was the first-of-its-kind reactor and the whole of the nuclear industry learned so much from what went on.
“It’s the technical learning and the careers that people have had. The 70 years of work that has contributed massively to the industry globally as well as to the local economy.”
Dounreay’s last reactor, the prototype fast reactor, shut down in 1994, since when the focus has been on cleaning up the site’s cluster of fuel and waste facilities.
In 2000, it was estimated the decommissioning would take until 2063 to complete at a cost of £4 billion.
That was revised five years later to 2036 for £2.7 billion.
Then, a Cavendish-led private consortium took charge of Dounreay’s decommissioning in 2012 with a £1 billion blueprint to have the site levelled by 2023.
Its contract was wound up in 2021 and the site became a subsidiary of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. D-Day has now been shunted off to the 2070s at a price tag of about £8 billion.