by Alan Irving

Last updated at 14:36, Thursday, 29 July 2010

BRITAIN would have run out of space to put radioactive material but for a timely £22 million facility in Copeland.

Vault 9, a huge new storage and disposal store on the outskirts of Drigg village, has come to the nation’s rescue for storing low levels of materials contaminated by radioactivity.

“We would have run out of space three or four months ago. There would have been serious potential impact on decommissioning work here in Cumbria and the UK,” disclosed Pres Rahe, chairman of UK Nuclear Waste Management.

Vault 9 was officially opened today (Thursday) and the American boss said everybody should be proud of safely delivering a project which would serve the UK for years to come.

The Drigg site, which BNFL operated for many years, is now under the ownership of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and operated by LLWR, whose parent body is URS Washington, one of the Sellafield consortium companies.

NDA head of waste and nuclear materials, Phil Davies, said: “We were running out of space quickly; it has come in the nick of time.

“Having this new vault in operation is vital for us to keep the door open to receiving waste from Sellafield and elsewhere in the UK. Without Vault 9, important nuclear clean-up programmes and operations would simply stall.

“The service provided here is also important to non-NDA customers such as Ministry of Defence and the healthcare sector. Vault 9 gives us at least another 10 years’ ability to accept waste here on the basis of current projections.”

Mr Rahe told community leaders: “Two years ago while Vault 9 had planning permission there was no contract in place to build it.

“At that time there was real concern that the UK would run out of space to manage low level nuclear waste with a serious potential impact to the important decommissioning work going on here in Cumbria and across the UK.

“Hard work by the NDA, the LLWR staff and Birse Nuclear (with its many sub-contractors) have taken that risk head on and today that short-term capacity gap has been eliminated. With Vault 9, we have 10 years’ worth of storage with more to come.”

For every year of its operation over the next decade, the NDA is putting £1.5 million into a special fund to benefit Copeland on top of a £10 million up-front payment.

More vaults are planned on the Drigg site but, to help free up long-term capacity, the government is looking at using conventional landfill to take even lower levels of radioactive material. Keekle Head and Lillyhall are two prospective sites in Copeland.

Vault 9 has a concrete base the size of three football pitches. It can hold 5,000 steel containers of waste and will be capped over when full.

First published at 14:32, Thursday, 29 July 2010
Published by http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk