Design contract awarded for Dounreay shaft and silo work
Dounreay has awarded an important waste clean-up contract to Jacobs as the site plans for the future of its deepest historic radioactive waste store.
The Dounreay shaft
Jacobs and its supporting partners have been awarded a 6-year contract to provide a design management team to produce a fully integrated design for the shaft and silo project. This includes assisting with the management of several design and build work packages. While some of the contract will be delivered remotely, Jacobs will also sub-contract work to local companies.
The contract forms part of a series of contracts to be awarded through the site’s decommissioning framework and heralds the beginning of work on the shaft and silo. In 2020 Nuvia Ltd and its partner Graham Construction were awarded a contract for “advanced transition works”. There are likely to be further major contracts awarded over the next 12 months.
Radioactive waste was historically consigned to the 65 metre deep shaft and the silo, an underground waste storage vault, over several decades starting in the late 1950s. Now the higher activity waste must be retrieved and repackaged, suitable for long-term storage in a safe modern facility.
DSRL’s Programme Delivery Director, David Hubbard said:
The shaft and silo contain legacy wastes that must be emptied, and the waste repackaged for long term storage, before the site can be closed. These contracts are one step closer to the clean-up of these historical waste stores.