Handling nuclear materials for less
are no moving parts inside the container you could also put solid waste in,” he said, adding other encapsulation plants cannot handle both solid and sludge waste together and must run two separate operations. “We can store up to 25 percent more solids compared to other methods.”
Wagner writes that, similarly, a problem with current systems is that a reusable internal paddle requires cleaning, a process that is time-consuming and generates radioactive secondary waste. All of this, BNS claims, could help cut the storage area needed for nuclear waste in half. The company believes this could reduce the nationwide nuclear reactor decommissioning budget by millions of pounds. Over the next century the decommissioning program will likely produce thousands of waste packages that will be retrieved, conditioned and stored for no less than £40 billion.
It is estimated that the bulk of the U.K.’s expenditure will be spent decommissioning the Sellafield site in north-west England, the country’s largest nuclear site. The site was officially shut down in 2005 and taken over in 2004 by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), a public organization under the U.K.’s Energy Act 2004 responsible for the decommissioning and cleanup of nuclear reactors. Approximately eighteen months ago, Kirk said the NDA contracted BNS along with other nuclear service companies to trial encapsulation technologies at the Sellafield site. BNS is now proof-of-scale trialling VEP against competing technologies as part of a Sellafield Project risk-reduction initiative.
While Kirk said he did not know the details of the other competing encapsulation technologies, he could confirm BNS’s technique will be the only one that does not use a drum and paddle mixer. The low-level waste from Sellafield is currently sent to a repository site in Drigg, Cumbria. Sellafield, like other nuclear reactor sites across the United Kingdom, also has significant quantities of intermediate level radioactive wastes. The NDA believes mixing such waste in cement grout within containers is a good short-term solution for storage, but long-term management will also need to be considered. The NDA has stated that the best option for long-term storage is deep geological disposal. The organization envisions storing the waste in a repository excavated in a stable rock formation, deep underground.
There has still been no site chosen for such a repository and the NDA claims it could take up to 11 years to find one. Even then, construction would be likely to take another 20 years and it would not begin to be filled with waste until 2040. It could then take up to 60 years to fill the sites. Meanwhile, there will be plenty of work for those in the encapsulation industry to do. According to the NDA, the United Kingdom has twenty-three reactors generating one-fifth of its electricity and all but one of these reactors will be decommissioned by 2023. Kirk claims the BNS method for encapsulation would be the right solution for future projects. “We want customers to know that this technology exists and there are alternatives to the traditional ways of doing things,” he said.
