FOI release

Information on Dounreay Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU)

Answers to questions related to the announcement on 31 March 2016 that 700kg of Dounreays’s HEU was to be shipped to the US.

• From: Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
• Published: 24 May 2016

Documents

Request for information on Dounreay HEU (including "NDA Support to Medical Radioisotope Production")

PDF, 102 KB, 4 pages

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Details

The NDA holds in safe and secure storage approximately 1 tonne of unirradiated Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU), in a wide variety of forms, most of which is at the Dounreay site.

Our strategy for the Dounreay site is to reach the defined interim end state by 2030 to 2033 See NDA Strategy.

Reaching the interim end state requires, amongst other things, the removal of the spent fuels and nuclear materials including the HEU currently held at the site. The removal of nuclear materials from the Dounreay site is already underway.

In our Exotic Fuels strategy in 2012 we set out our preferred plans to remove nuclear materials from Dounreay including the stocks of unirradiated HEU and consolidate them at Sellafield for continued safe and secure storage. At the time, we identified the option of sending the unirradiated HEU material overseas for processing and return of the material into the fuel cycle but this option was considered low probability.

Published 24 May 2016