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Export Leads The Way To Projects

For the first time a redundant building at Sellafield is being decommissioned and refurbished to provide an operational facility that will enable the retrieval of inventory and the decommissioning of the old Magnox Storage Pond B30.

A Sellafield project team is working to turn the redundant inlet building in the B30 Magnox Storage and Decanning Facility into a working export facility and has delivered the first phase of the project within budget and ahead of schedule, representing a significant step forward in the remediation of B30.

The export project will modify and refurbish the inlet building into a facility that will enable skips of inventory to be removed from the storage pond, placed in flasks and exported to the Box Encapsulation Plant.

Constructed in the early 1960’s, the inlet building received consignments of fuel in Magnox flasks. It ceased being fully operational in 1986 with limited use being made of the facility before all operations finally ended in 2001.

Andy Oldham, Export Area Project Manager, outlines some of the challenges in what may be viewed as the most difficult part of the project.

He said, “There is a perception that decommissioning doesn’t start until the first brick of a building has been removed or the first lot of waste has been exported.

“What this project illustrates is the complexity of any decommissioning project and the amount of work and number of man hours that is needed to prepare for demolishing buildings or in this case moving waste.”

Key decisions

One of the early strategic decisions taken by the early project team was to establish a dedicated Island Site Facility providing permit, health physics and safety accommodation within the Inlet building. The driver behind the decision was to both ease demands on the B30 complex permit office and to increase construction productivity by reducing contractor walking and waiting times.

“We converted what was an operational chemical dosing room into an office environment with safe and segregated pedestrian and vehicle access, effectively creating a dedicated control point for the project with local access for safe systems of work controller and health physics and safety.” Andy said.

Another key preparatory task was the general clean up and painting of the inlet building.

With substantial amount of the work undertaken using PVC protective suits, the team removed loose contamination from all surfaces in the building including the roof steelwork to minimise the risk of airborne contamination during the subsequent strip out and construction work. The lower level steelwork was also refurbished and painted to provide a cleaner working environment.

The team were then able to effectively strip out redundant out-cell equipment and provide infrastructure improvements to support control and surveillance operations.

This phase of the project has seen 650 metres of replacement services pipe work installed, tested and commissioned, the installation of 2000 metres of racking and tray work and 300 metres of cabling, not to mention the 1500 metres of redundant pipe work that was stripped out.

Complex tasks

Each of these tasks had its own complexities requiring months of preparation and careful coordination between a number of teams, departments and contractors before work began.

The Lead Project Engineer on the team, Eric Scott explains: “We had to install the necessary cables, pipe work and racking to provide normal and essential power distribution systems.

“After nine months of design work and close liaison between safe systems of work controller, health physics and safety, site management team and the Kvaener & Morson design teams, work started on the installation of the new mechanical and electrical distribution systems using established contractors such as Shepleys, Balfour Kilpatrick and PC Richardson.
“This work was done within the confines of an existing building within limited space. It was also done while the existing systems were still operational and with the added radiological challenges of a decommissioning project at Sellafield.”

The success of this work was principally down to the establishment of a dedicated Site Management Team, BNFL Construction Manager, Benet Wace, commented: “This was an unprecedented example of close working relationships paying huge dividends in success.

“The Site Management Team led by Bob Marshall established a co-ordination team with dedicated site superintendents with an absolute focus safety delivering results on site.”

The next phase will see the decontamination and implementation of the in-cell strip out, creating what is essentially an empty shell for the Export Facility.

The final phase of the project will be the design and implementation of refurbishment, modifications and replacement necessary to provide an operational facility.

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