£60m decommissioning contract for marine company
BARROW-in-Furness-based marine engineering specialist James Fisher and Sons nuclear subsidiary has won a £60m contract to decommission a reactor core at Winfrith in Dorset.
James Fisher Nuclear has been awarded the work by Magnox. The contract is to design and deliver a facility to segment and package the reactor core of the redundant Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactor (SGHWR) over a four year period.
JFS chief executive Nick Henry said: “We are proud to have been awarded this contract which firmly establishes JFN as the leading reactor decommissioning contractor in the UK.
“Such contracts require great expertise and experience in remote handling techniques, and this award is further testament to the market leading experience of our team in this area which enables us to provide cost effective solutions for the decommissioning programme.”
SGHWR was the largest of the nine experimental reactors commissioned on the Winfrith site, constructed between 1963 and 1967 and generating up to 100MW, sufficient electricity to power the needs of a small town.
The reactor was finally shut down in 1990 and has subsequently been subject to de-fuelling and decommissioning operations. Cutting up and packaging the reactor core for disposal is a major step in returning the site to a green field state.
The SGHWR reactor is only the second reactor core within the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) estate to be subject to decommissioning utilising remote techniques. The first was Windscale Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (WAGR), Sellafield, undertaken by BNFL Project Services in partnership with JFN.
