Ever stood atop a nuclear reactor? Seen how fuel rods are inserted or where spent fuel goes?
Neither had I until I was awarded a 3-week secondment at Nuclear Restoration Services (NRS) Sizewell A, a former Magnox reactor which is currently undergoing decommissioning. Sizewell A is located on the coast of Suffolk and spent 40 years generating power for the local area till it was taken offline in 2006.
The reason for my secondment was to shadow the Radiological Monitoring Persons on site as they performed routine monitoring activities onsite. This knowledge and experience are vital for my current PhD research where I am aiming to automate some of their routine and mundane operations such as scanning objects and humans for contamination. I was put through a rigorous training course which allowed me to enter radiological- and contamination-controlled areas up to R4/C2. This allowed me to explore most of site and gain a good understanding of how Magnox reactors worked.
I was taken on several tours and learnt the whole lifecycle of natural uranium fuel as well as a lot about the current processes and methodologies used on site to monitor objects, humans and different waste streams. I was incredibly lucky to have been afforded such an amazing opportunity as part of my NRS Dounreay funded PhD.
I go into a lot more detail about the whole placement on the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) website here as well as on the CRADLE website.
Massive thank you to Michael Carr: NDA Radiation Protection Manager, Gareth Ward: Sizewell A Waste Manager, and all the other NRS and NDA staff which organised and made this secondment possible as well as NRS and the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), who co-fund my PhD through an Industrial Cooperative Awards in Science & Engineering (iCASE) voucher.
Photo gallery
All photos are provided courtesy of the NDA, and as such use of these photos should be referenced as both this page and giving formal credit to the NDA.
