Plea to decide on future use of Dounreay site post-decommissioning
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Highland Council is being urged to firm up what uses it foresees being made of Dounreay after it has been decommissioned.
The plea comes in an in-house paper which favours reworking the programme to remediate ground at the redundant nuclear power research complex.
Its option would generate a quarter of the radioactive waste that is currently envisaged would need to be shipped off site.
The paper has been written by Richard Short, of Dounreay Restoration Site Ltd, and James Penfold, a specialist in the decontamination of nuclear sites.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which owns and runs Dounreay, currently expects the clean-up of the cluster of reactor and waste plants at the Caithness site to be completed by 2033.
But Mr Short and Mr Penfold say what the future holds for Dounreay thereafter needs to be built into the current programme.
They state: "The designated future use of the site is important as it influences the clean-up targets that need to be achieved when dealing with non-radioactive contamination.
"This issue needs to be better resolved soon as the fate of the site’s infrastructure and the final ground condition will need to be co-ordinated with the decommissioning and clean-up plans.
"There soon will be a need for significantly more detailed designs for closure engineering to be established to provide confidence that the planned end state conditions will meet anticipated targets."
They say future uses will determine whether embedded utilities, roadways and drains are retained.
"These assets will require maintenance but could have value if the future of the site involved some form of industry," they argue.
"Alternatively, if the agreed future use were to be focused on farming or conservation, then roadways and the subsurface infrastructure would need to be removed, generating a considerable additional volume of waste."
They point out that in either case, maintaining site drainage would be desirable.
Highland Council's latest planning framework supports future business and industrial activity.
It has pledged to continue to review potential options for the re-use of the site with DSRL, NDA, industry regulators and community representatives.
