British Nuclear Group Ltd, Dungeness

Industrial cleaning services at British Nuclear Group Ltd, DungenessA decommissioning challenge

Interserve’s highly-trained and fully-qualified operatives offer a wealth of experience in industrial cleaning services across a wide variety of environments, specialising in specific tailored single cleans; pre and post outage cleans; and maintenance cleaning contracts.

Staff are fully conversant with the specialised requirements relating to working in a confined space, within boiler and other environments. The project at Dungeness provided us with an opportunity to develop our strengths.

Dungeness is an operational twin reactor station and on a typical day it supplies enough electricity to serve the energy needs of the South East of England. The key focus of British Nuclear Group is to operate Dungeness to maximise electricity generation and income whilst employing the highest standards of safety, health, radiological protection, security and environmental protection.

Preparatory work for defueling and investigative work for care and maintenance preparations will also take place in parallel to pave the way for decommissioning. Defueling commenced once generation had ceased, with all the fuel elements being removed and dispatched from the site. Integral to the successful decommissioning programme is the demolition of the turbine hall to free the land for a new waste processing building. During the care and maintenance preparations phase comes the challenge of removing all buildings from the site, leaving only the weatherproofed reactor buildings, waste storage and security controls.

The site will remain in a safe and secure state for a prolonged period until final site clearance, when the site is completely cleared of all remaining building, structures and fencing, de-licensed and available for re-use.

Achievements

  • Interserve has completed the outage for two internal reactor circuits and four external reactor circuits at Dungeness on time and under budget. The circuits were opened in a safe, controlled manner for inspection. Remedial works were carried out in an active area on some items including bellows liner plate, cone diffuser bolts and man doors.
  • Interserve was responsible for all planning, resourcing, training and execution of all works involved in the outage. Our procedures were introduced, following an audit by the NII, and shown to other contractors as best working practise. The contract involved non-destructive testing, rope access and high level inspections, during the maintenance shutdown of the Magnox plant.
  • The contract extended Interserve’s continued relationship with British Nuclear Group and further strengthened its position as a major player within the nuclear sector.

Major Projects Divisional Director, Bob Odell, commented: “We are looking forward to building on our relationships with the BNFL staff at Dungeness with a view to a long term commitment from both parties; this is a fast track contract which will put substantial demands on our site team to deliver the extensive work package in the 12 week time frame”.