Jan 28 Last nuclear facility to be decommissioned

The waste treatment plant is the sixth and last of Risø's original nuclear plant to be decommissioned. Funds have now been allocated to start work.

D On 19 December 2019, the Danish Parliament's Finance Committee joined Act 59 to decommission the waste treatment plant and associated storages. This will release a further part of the billion (in 2003 kroner) DD The creation of the nuclear installations was reserved for the decommissioning of the six nuclear installations.

The waste treatment plant is the country's only radioactive waste receiving station. It has a number of facilities for receiving, minimizing and sorting, characterising, packing and storing the waste. Since some of the facilities will remain in operation as long as waste comes from decommissioning of the plants, preparations for this last project have been underway for a long time.

In May 2019, the nuclear regulatory authorities approved the overall project description for the decommissioning. Prior to this, a thorough clean-up of the waste treatment plant was undertaken and the permanent workplaces of a number of staff were relocated to other buildings. The relocation of the facilities that will remain in operation then started. These are a soft water plant, a distillation plant, a laundry, a chemical laboratory and an isotope laboratory. These facilities will be transferred to two existing buildings near the main building of DD.

As part of the project, the current waste storages will also have to be decommissioned. However, the fact that a decision on a permanent solution for radioactive waste has not yet been taken has meant that the emptying of stocks prior to purification will be both more expensive and more difficult than originally thought.

The waste cannot be transferred directly to a final repository, but instead must be moved to the upgraded intermediate storage facility we are building. This is expected to happen from the beginning of 2023. Decommissioning is already hampered by insufficient storage capacity, so by 2020 one of the current  storage facilities will be expanded as a temporary solution.

Intermediate storage also means that additional shielding is needed for the packed waste. Various steel inserts must be custom made, which can be moulded into concrete in existing steel container types. This will keep the radiation on the outside of the containers down to a level that allows work to be done near the waste.

The total cost of decommissioning the Treatment Station and stocks, including packing of the waste for intermediate storage, is expected to run to DKK 141 million (+/- 25 percent uncertainty).
Read the approved document