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Celebrating its 20th anniversary
The Imperial College Reactor Centre (ICRC) in Ascot has the first reactor completely decommissioned to fashionable regulations in UK nuclear history, and only the third reactor in the UK to have completed this process. Your land can now be safely used for other purposes.
The ICRC, part of Imperial College London, opened in Silwood Park in 1965 and is one of the country’s four university reactors. When it closed in 2012, it was the last civil studies reactor in the UK.
The water-cooled reactor was small in terms of reactor (7 m deep and 1. 2 m in diameter) and generated one hundred kW of heat. The university has used the reactor primarily for training purposes, but also for studies in many neutron and reactor spaces. physics. Physics, chemistry and engineering students from the University of London were able to make a stopover and enjoy working with neutrons, gamma rays and radioisotopes. The academics’ studies focused on studies of neutron activation, which is used for the concentration of elements in other materials. When the reactor was last used in 2010, it also had publicity uses, including the production of radioisotopes and the calibration of X-ray instruments.
Trevor Chambers joined Imperial as director of the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s reactor centre to scale up the complex decommissioning plan, which lasted seven years and was overseen through the Office of Nuclear Responsibility (ONR). The first step was to remove 31 fuel rods and 4 rods. , as well as intermediate activity waste, and its shipment to Sellafield, Cumbria, for storage and reprocessing. The fuel phase-out was completed in 2014.
“We had to build and design a lot of apparatus from scratch that would allow us to safely remove the fuel rods from the reactor and ship them to Sellafield,” says Chambers. “We built a ‘flask’ over the reactor and disposed of the 31 rods in equipment that employs a small lead-shielded flask to protect the workers’ bodies from radioactivity. Once all the rods were safely inside the shipping bottle, it was shipped out of the structure and lifted into the safe shipping vehicle via a cellular crane beforehand. Until the water ran out, we were necessarily generating some other reactor in the shipping bottle. So we had to show ONR that there was no threat of the shipping bottle fitting critically.
The decommissioning of the reactor and surrounding biological shield was completed in February 2020. The construction housing the reactor had to be radiologically and chemically emptied before it was demolished and the debris transported to low-level sites. The demolition of all structures in the building was completed in April. 2021 after a delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic and a family of badgers that had reoccupied nearby villages.
The final cleanup included the investigation of soil samples for a diversity of radionuclides using gamma spectrometry. All soil samples tested through Imperial now have radiation at general background levels. The Silwood is no longer under the regulatory control of the ONR.
“The site is conserved through Imperial Oil and is part of the larger Silwood Park campus, which is a center for ecological studies and policy,” says Ross Manson, the university’s head of radiation protection. “The site-specific intermediate reactor site has evolved as an open area for recreation and students. “