Planning and progress of the WAGR decommissioning project

In the United Kingdom, the earliest production reactors, which will be decommissioned first, are of the Magnox type. The Windscale Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor, is however, sufficiently similar to make it a suitable prototype decommissioning project. The planning and progress so far is described. Special decommissioning equipment, including a remote dismantling machine, has been developed and a waste packaging building built on site. Its function is to enable all intermediate-level and low-level radioactive waste removed from the reactor vault by remote equipment to be packaged remotely into suitable containers. The work done on the WAGR decommissioning has shown that the dismantling of a power-producing reactor is feasible and can be accomplished using existing engineering techniques. (U.K.)