Funding shortfall may delay Dounreay clean-up

Published on Thursday 25 January 2007 00:37

CLEANING up the notorious waste shaft at the Dounreay nuclear station could be delayed by more than a decade due to a funding gap, it emerged yesterday.

The UK Atomic Energy Authority ( UKAEA) has started drilling up to 400 boreholes to isolate the site's shaft and allow a cocktail of radioactive and chemical materials to be removed.

If all goes according to plan, the project could be completed within 20 years.

But there is uncertainty over the future timetable due to doubts over funding from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority,

which has an estimated 160 million shortfall in its 2.2 billion annual budget. Cuts or delays in NDA funding could push the completion date at Dounreay back to the 2040s.

However Simon Middlemass, Dounreay's acting site director, said he did not expect any delay.

"Everything is in the melting pot with NDA funding, and there are no guarantees. But this would be one of the last projects we would consider stopping," he said.

Emptying the shaft could eventually cost about 200 million and is seen as the biggest project in the 2.9 billion decommissioning of Dounreay by 2033.

The work to isolate the shaft is costing 28 million. Boreholes will be drilled to a depth of 80 metres in a boot shape around the 65 metre shaft. These will then be filled with a fine cement grout to seal off the shaft.

But one of the biggest difficulties facing UKAEA is that the shaft's exact contents, which have been lying for 50 years, are not known.

Among the items dumped are consignments from the 1950s of sodium potassium, the type of material that caused an explosion in 1977.