Decommissioning

Scope

Our staff have broad based-waste retrievals, decommissioning and waste management experience which allows Eden NE to support clients at the decommissioning strategy and planning stage of facility lifecycles. Work undertaken by our staff include broad decommissioning planning projects through to identifying solutions to specific retrievals problems. Our capabilities in this area include:

Support to the pre-concept design of the Submarine Dismantling Project.
Pre-concept decommissioning planning to support new build Advanced Modular Reactor planning.
Development of a phased decommissioning approach for waste facilities.
Pre-concept design and a concept of operations for ILW problematic items retrievals.

Our Services

Our services include leading pre-concept decommissioning strategy and planning work to support investment appraisals at the Strategic Outline Case and Outline Business Case stages in accordance with the HM Government Green Book. Work is executed (with support of externally supplied engineering design capabilities) on a through-life basis to enable full lifetime costs and benefits to be established to support decision making. This includes the identification and development of options, producing data packs for the options, facilitating decision making workshops and developing the Concept of Operations for preferred options.

We also offer waste-led requirements identification and development. Our work begins with an analysis of the aims of the process under development and the available data to support option development, down selection and subsequent design of preferred approaches. Requirements are developed for the full through life approach from retrievals through to end states such as reuse, recycling or disposal. The through-life approach is used to ensure the upstream and downstream impacts of decisions taken at a given stage (e.g. retrievals) can be understood and inform final decision making.

Our expertise extends to retrievals and decommissioning problem solving through holistic technical support. We provide specialist technical support to design teams at the pre-concept and conceptual design stages. Our broad understanding of the business case process, broad-based technical expertise, front end processing technique identification and understanding of waste management endpoints (based on the waste minimisation hierarchy) enables us to support ‘right-first time’ solution development.

Benefits

Delivery of effective and efficient decommissioning and retrievals pre-concept solution development. Rigour and auditability achieved through the development of through-life options underpinned by a Concept of Operations and the identification of future work to reduce uncertainty in areas which differentiate between options.
Delivery of decommissioning and retrievals potential solutions which align with the key business case phases, with outputs enabling approvals at that stage and providing scoping of the subsequent business case phase.
Effective early-stage option identification and development by combining broad technical expertise, innovation techniques (such as horizon scanning, focus on ‘what matters’, problem reframing, breadth of assessment criteria), with a clear understanding of end states for radioactive and non-radioactive wastes and the requirements for processing, transport and storage between each key step to the end state.