June 30 IAEA gathers knowledge on radiation protection

One of the Danish Commissioning Health physicists contributes with experience in dismantling reactor DR2.

M Most of the world's nuclear reactors were built in the 1960s and 1970s, so it will not be many years before they have to be decommissioned and decommissioned. This kind of work requires protection against radiation, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has launched a project to gather the preliminary experience. The project kicked off with a workshop in Vienna from 16-19 June 2014.

At the workshop, 16 participants from almost as many countries discussed the main issues of protecting employees during the demolition of reactors.

Danish Decommissioning is quite well known abroad for our knowledge of radiation protection, and health physicist Thommy Larsen was invited to talk about our experience with decommissioning and dismantling research reactor DR2. The reactor was a light water reactor of the pool type, i.e. open at the top so that you could see down to the reactor core through seven metres of water. It was decommissioned in 2006-2008.

The international experience DD we are the first to do the job at home to de-commission. Quite often, we find that companies around the world have faced similar problems and have found a solution that can be recycled more or less directly from DD .