Waste Categorisation Study

The Challenge

Recommendations from previous work carried out by SOA team in the Low Level Waste (LLW) and Sellafield Separation Area (SEP) indicated substantial gains could be made by taking an holistic view of waste management. The Waste Categorisation Study (WCS) project objective was to reduce the liability of radioactive waste (and inherent treatment and storage costs) to the UK taxpayer by working with waste management teams to reduce nuclear waste arisings.

The Solution

The first project phase was limited to LLW and Plutonium Contaminated Material (PCM) generated within SEP. This area generates a substantial amount of waste (up to one-third of Sellafield arisings) and has been the subject of much improvement activity lead by Waste Retrieval and Segregation.

The key tasks included:

• Collecting data on waste treatment techniques, waste forecasts and characterisations. 
• Developing agreed evaluation criteria. 
• Developing a waste hierarchy.
• Development of a process model that could be used to quantitatively select the most appropriate techniques for specific waste forms. 
• Using the model to analyse the suitability of each technique against forecast waste arisings in terms of cost benefit and environmental impact. 
• Using the model to group techniques into preferred scenario options.

By experimentation and dialogue with the manufacturing teams a desired future state was developed that complemented current operations whilst moving towards to best practice.

The Benefit

The LLW manufacturing lead team applied the WCS approach at three workshop sessions to the SEP area. As a result of these workshops the following benefits were identified: 

• The waste management techniques were prioritised and combined into a preferred way forward. 
• More aggressive planning at the waste generation stage to reduce, re-use and recycle LLW, will result in a reduction in LLW generation of approximately 10%. 
• Plans to monitor existing compactable waste packets to categorise waste for free release were accelerated by approximately six months. 
• Applying the waste hierarchy methodology the combined LLW and PCM savings could result approximately £1m year. 
• The previous 10% over estimation of savings using traditional non–hierarchical evaluation methods was eliminated.
  

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