(NPL: Teddington, England) -- The National Physical Laboratory has signed a long-term framework agreement with Sellafield, a British nuclear decommissioning site license company controlled by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a U.K. government body set up specifically to deal with the nuclear legacy under the Energy Act 2004. The agreement states a commitment to collaborate further on new measurement research projects.
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For many years, encapsulated waste products have been stored at the Sellafield nuclear site, and over the next decade, retrievals from legacy ponds and silos will generate more. As Sellafield moves to waste management and remediation, the range of waste products is also expected to increase.
It is vital that inspection of the waste stores and their key properties is undertaken to ensure safe storage—for example, that no physical degradation has taken place. However, with many thousands of packages located in engineered stores, it is too time-consuming to manually extract and inspect them all. Many packages are stored underwater, presenting a further inspection challenge. Therefore, in-situ measurement techniques are required to demonstrate appropriate store and waste-package control, allowing appropriate mitigating action when necessary, and reducing both the potential for human error and the dose to workers who currently provide ad-hoc measurement capability.
The new agreement builds on the existing working relationship between the two organizations and will support a number of new R&D projects aiming to implement NPL’s metrology capability and traceable measurements. In doing so, NPL is supporting Sellafield’s nuclear decommissioning mission.
Cyrus Larijani, strategic business development manager, says, “I am delighted that our long-running partnership with Sellafield has been extended for another four years, allowing for plenty of future collaborations in nuclear decommissioning.”
Find out more about NPL’s work with Sellafield:
• On reliable temperature measurement
• Improved understanding of stored nuclear materials
• Monitoring temperature of nuclear waste
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