nuclear-news

What happens after a nuclear power station is closed?

 When Hinkley Point B. opened in 1976, its two advanced gas-cooled reactors
(AGRs) were state of the art. But over nearly half a century of generation,
cracks developed in their graphite cores, creating potential safety
concerns, and they were shut down for good last year.

Yet inside the
cavernous main hall, little seems to have changed. Freshly painted
machinery gleams under bright lights, as teams of workers in blue boiler
suits scurry around above the reactors themselves. The main activity at the
moment is defueling: removing hundreds of fuel assemblies from deep within
the reactor cores, stripping them down, and sending the wastes away for
storage at Sellafield. As we watch, a large steel tower is being positioned
over the reactor.

This is the charging machine. It looks rather like an
old-fashioned helter-skelter, but in fact it is a heavily-shielded crane.
The fuel assemblies, having been in the reactor for years, are highly
radioactive and need to be handled with extreme care.

Once defueling is
complete, EDF will hand over the site to the Nuclear Decommissioning
Authority (NDA). To find out what happens then, it is worth going next door
– to another power station, Hinkley Point A. This was one of the UK’s
first-generation nuclear sites. Its two reactors were brought online in
1965 – and shut down for good in 2000. Nearly a quarter of a century later,
its two box-like reactor buildings still stand tall against the skyline.

But other buildings, including the huge turbine hall, have been removed –
leaving just a deep, weed-strewn hole in the ground. Old fuel storage ponds
have been drained, cleaned and painted to reduce radiation risks, although
we are warned not to linger around them. But elsewhere a water-filled vault
remains half-full of radioactive scrap, which is being painstakingly
removed.

 BBC 27th Oct 2023

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67087673 #nuclear #antinuclear #NoNukes

October 29, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | decommission reactor, UK