Dounreay's Waste Management Strategies for Success - 22013

The Dounreay site is focused on decommissioning, and represents one of the most complex, technically challenging, and hazardous nuclear clean-up projects in Europe. In April 2021, Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd (DSRL) was re-instated as a subsidiary of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). DSRL remain tasked to deliver a defined scope of work to decommission the site to achieve an agreed End State. That scope includes a key deliverable to produce a revised Lifetime Plan in the next 18 months which will identify revised timelines for the delivery of the programme. There are significant technical and regulatory challenges to achieve this, as well as safely managing the transition for our workforce on what is effectively a 'closure' contract. Beyond the interim end point, Dounreay will store passively safe higher activity wastes (HAW) until a disposal solution is implemented within Scotland. Following on from a paper presented in 2019 which focused on waste being the quality product of decommissioning, this paper will focus on some of the key challenges around inventory management, radioactive waste strategy development as well as case studies of key decommissioning and waste management projects currently underway on the Dounreay site. The relevance of this work to the wider nuclear family is that the waste management challenges at Dounreay range from retrieval of unique legacy wastes from a deep shaft (65 metres), some of the highest radioactivity in terms of our liquid raffinates through to ensuring that there are open and available waste routes for the decommissioning of our old reprocessing facilities through to our 3 reactors. These tasks are at various stages in their programme life cycles and therefore represent the opportunity for learning from our experiences and more importantly understanding what innovation may be available around the world. All of this supports our approach to delivering a waste informed decommissioning programme in a timeframe that our stakeholders can support. (authors)