nuclear-news

250 tonnes of documents about UK’s Dounreay nuclear reactor

Dounreay documents set for nuclear archive The Scotsman, 20 Aug 13, A STAGGERING 250 tonnes of historic documents, charting the development of Britain’s first fast-breeder nuclear reactor at Dounreay, will be among the first items to be stored in the new National Nuclear Archive to be built in Caithness, it was revealed today.

The £20 million national archive centre for the nuclear industry is to be built close to Wick Airport, near the Dounreay experimental power complex, and will eventually house an estimated 30 million digital, paper and photographic records from civil nuclear sites throughout the UK, dating back to the 1940s.
The archive will include records from the UK Atomic Energy Authority in Harwell where the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, the UK centre for research and development into civil nuclear power, was first based.

A spokesman for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said that the new archive building would be open for business by 2016, just in time for the majority of the documents in the Dounreay archive to be moved offsite, before the existing archive building is vacated.

Ian Pearson, the Dounreay archivist, explained that the site’s archive currently held 250 tonnes of records which if laid out would stretch nearly two-and-a-half miles. Some of these date back to the early days on construction and operation of Dounreay……. http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/heritage/dounreay-documents-set-for-nuclear-archive-1-3052390

August 20, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | resources - print, UK