Work to dismantle the systems and components inside the reactor building has begun at Italy's shut down Caorso nuclear power plant, Società Gestione Impianti Nucleari SpA announced.
Caorso - an 860 MWe boiling water reactor - was closed in 1990 after just 12 years of operation and is now being decommissioned. The plant's decommissioning licence was obtained in 2014.
Società Gestione Impianti Nucleari SpA (Sogin) said workers have already begun tracing the cutting points to dismantle the systems and components into pieces. This work is necessary, it said, to ensure that each element can be easily identified and grouped based on the plant system it comes from and its possible contamination.
The activities carried out so far have included the creation of the construction site electrical system and will continue with the installation of the vehicles for handling the dismantled materials and the setting up of a plant for hot cutting, specifically designed to tackle the most complex components in terms of size and thickness.
The first systems and components to be dismantled will be those located at ground level, Sogin said. This will free up space for the passage of materials from other floors of the reactor building. At ground level there is a confined corridor, called the waste route, created by Sogin, where the cut components will be transferred to the turbine building to be decontaminated, cut and further reduced in volume to facilitate their subsequent management.
The dismantling project is divided into various areas, each of which includes a detailed dismantling plan. This planning ensures compliance with the safety criteria and requirements indicated by the National Inspectorate for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection.
A total of 3400 tonnes of material will be dismantled, of which about 88% will be releasable after the necessary treatment and decontamination operations, while the remaining 12% will be managed as radioactive waste and stored on-site pending transfer to the national repository, once available.