No two days are the same when on the job as a decommissioning manager. Nuclear facilities come in all shapes and sizes, and with each facility having its own unique design, decommissioners have to develop highly detailed and tailored plans and often create new, innovative solutions for safely dismantling a facility piece by piece.
To get an idea of what is involved in a decommissioning manager’s job, we spoke with Steven Slater, Head of the Programme for Site Remediation and Decommissioning Projects at the Sellafield site in the United Kingdom, which is home to several active and shutdown nuclear power and reprocessing facilities, nuclear waste stores, and nuclear research and development laboratories. He is responsible for the safe management and decommissioning of over 150 nuclear facilities and for more than 500 staff across Sellafield.
This week's International Conference on Advancing the Global Implementation of Decommissioning and Environmental Remediation Programmes, in Madrid, Spain, will cover important issues in these two fields. The latest issue of the IAEA Bulletin also deals with this topic. See the full edition here.
How does the job of a decommissioner differ from that of an operator?
I am responsible for the safe maintenance of facilities until we commence decommissioning activities, at which point I am responsible for the safe management of the decommissioning project and removal of the radioactive materials. The main objective of my job is to safely remove any residual radioactive materials after the post-operational clean out phase and make the remaining materials safe for long term disposal.
Some of the decommissioning work I undertake is completely alien to an operator. In my role, I expose the inventory, recover the inventory, and put it into a safe, passive form. For an operator, that would appear to be very alien. The main job of an operator is keeping radioactive materials contained at all times throughout the entire process and lifetime of a nuclear operation.
The key difference between decommissioning and operations is that decommissioning is project-based with a defined start and end point. Operations are process-oriented where you move from one process to another process.
What is the biggest or most significant challenge in your job?
Because of the age of facilities, they are often not as expected in terms of drawings, and legacy issues associated with age-related defects are often a challenge. We would love a facility to be exactly as it is on the drawing, but some of these facilities are almost 50 years old. They have been modified many, many times during those 50 years of use. Our plants are not what we would have expected based on drawings and records. So each time we go into some of these facilities, it’s a voyage of discovery.
Some of the decommissioning work I undertake is completely alien to an operator.