Sellafield waste vault yields 1960s-era finds
A 1960s Electrolux vacuum cleaner was among the more unusual items workers removed from one of the world’s oldest nuclear waste stores at the United Kingdom’s Sellafield nuclear site.
Constructed in the early 1950s, Sellafield’s Pile Fuel Cladding Silo was built to store intermediate-level radioactive fuel cladding waste. Retrieval of waste from the silo is a key priority for Sellafield Ltd., the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority company cleaning up the site.
A locked vault: The concrete Pile Fuel Cladding Silo has effectively been a locked vault since the 1970s, when waste stopped being “tipped” into its six compartments. After decades of work to figure out how to take waste from a building designed to never be emptied, retrievals teams are now doing exactly that, according to Sellafield Ltd.
As of late April, enough waste to fill 18 storage boxes had been cleared from the silo, which has stored over 3,200 cubic meters of ILW for 70 years. To retrieve the waste, telescopic “grabs” are used to reach into the silo and lift out the waste through holes cut in the top of each of the six compartments.
“The vacuum cleaner is a great example of how challenging it is to clear this silo. We don’t know for sure what’s in there. They didn’t keep accurate records in those days,” said Roddy Miller, Sellafield Ltd.’s chief operating officer.
How did it get there? It’s believed the household vacuum was used to suck up dust in the facility during its operational life in the 1950s and 1960s. Because the dust was radioactive, when the vacuum was no longer needed, the only place to dispose of it was in the silo itself.
“Anything taken into the building by the workforce of the day was likely to be contaminated because of the environment they were working in,” Miller added. “There was no alternative disposal route for contaminated material, so everything just went into the silo.
Ironically, a modern-day vacuum cleaner is also playing a part in the waste removal job at Sellafield, sucking up dust created when waste is dropped into storage boxes. It will eventually be consigned as waste itself, joining its 1960s predecessor.
High hazard facilities: One of Sellafield’s biggest challenges is the need to take waste out of its legacy ponds and silos, considered the site’s most hazardous nuclear facilities.
In addition to the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo, there is another silo and two ponds at the Sellafield site that need to be emptied. The ponds store used nuclear fuel underwater and were also not designed to be emptied.
Each one of these facilities requires its own unique decommissioning plan, and all of them will take decades to complete, Sellafield Ltd. said.
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