Dounreay nuclear power plant

Dounreay nuclear power plant
Access to the plant with the DFR reactor in the foreground and the PFR building on the right in the background
location
Coordinates	58 ° 34 '44 "  N , 3 ° 45' 0"  W Coordinates: 58 ° 34 '44 "  N , 3 ° 45' 0"  W.
Country:	Great Britain
Data
Owner:	United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority
Operator:	United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority
Project start:	1955
Commercial operation:	Oct. 1, 1962
Shutdown:	March 31, 1994
Decommissioned reactors (gross):	3 (265 MW)
Energy fed in since commissioning:	7,671 GWh
Was standing:	August 1, 2007
The data source of the respective entries can be found in the documentation .

The Dounreay is near a ruined castle in the county of Caithness in the municipality of Highland on the north coast of Scotland . This castle is now on a site that was used by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the Ministry of Defense . The site is known as the location of several nuclear facilities, three of which were owned by the UKAEA and operated by the UKAEA until March 31, 2008. There are two blocks: DFR and PFR .

The spherical reactor housing of the DFR operated from 1961 to 1977

history

The Dounreay Nuclear Power Development Establishment - like the Bradwell nuclear power station - was set up next to an old military airfield. It was selected in the early 1950s as the center for the development of the fast breeder reactor and the associated fuel cycle (fuel assembly, reprocessing ).

The British Ministry of Defense business here for 40 years an agency called Vulcan NRTE (Vulcan Naval Reactor Test Establishment), nuclear drives for the nuclear submarines of the Royal Navy have been developed. The facility is also known as the Admiralty Reactor Test Establishment (ARTE).

In addition to the three reactors, which were shut down mainly for economic reasons (canceled subsidies) and numerous waste treatment facilities, there are also two decommissioned reprocessing plants on the site . The first plant is the MTR Fuel Reprocessing Plant D1204 for the recovery of highly enriched uranium from spent fuel elements of domestic and foreign material test reactors (MTR). Among other things, fuels from the MTR reactors in Dounreay and Harwell were reprocessed. The plant had been in operation since 1958. A second plant was used to reprocess the highly enriched fuel from the DFR breeder reactor. Between 1975 and 1979, the plant was converted into the D1206 plant , in which the spent mixed oxide fuel from the PFR breeder reactor was processed.

In the meantime, the processing of nuclear fuels has been stopped and dismantling work has begun. On April 1, 2005, the property became the property of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), and since April 1, 2008, most of the facilities have been operated by them.

Accidents

On May 10, 1977, a liquid mixture of two kilograms of sodium and potassium was lowered into a 65-meter-deep shaft. Among other things, spent fuel elements from the 1960s were stored in the shaft . This underground landfill was flooded with seawater to shield it from radioactivity. It is known from chemistry that pure sodium and potassium in liquid form react very strongly with water. There was an explosion that sank radioactive material and appears to have spread widely. The concrete cover of the shaft, which weighed around seven tons, was thrown three to four meters away, and a steel plate with a diameter of one and a half meters flew about twelve meters. Parts from the shaft flew up to the beach about 40 meters away, other parts were found up to 75 meters away. In the foreshore, more than ten radioactive millimeter-sized particles have been found annually since 1983, one on a popular beach. The incident only became known in 1995 through a report by a commission of the responsible Ministry of Health. The Dounreay foreshore was then cordoned off.

After the discovery of a small leak in the dissolver's cooling circuit, D1206 was temporarily suspended in October 1996. In July 2001 the British government decided not to resume reprocessing operations.

Further development

A repository for radioactive waste is planned in Dounreay to accommodate the waste that is generated when the nuclear facilities are dismantled . Because of the occurrence of radioactive compounds from uranium and plutonium on the entire site, the facility is viewed as a security risk and is strictly guarded.

• 

  DFR scheme

• 

  The DFR in October 1986

Data of the reactor blocks

The Dounreay nuclear power plant had three reactors, two of which were commercial power reactors:

Reactor block	Reactor type	net power	gross power	start of building	Network synchronization	Commercialization of essential operation	switching off processing
Dounreay DFR	Fast breeder reactor	11 MW	15 MW	03/01/1955	10/01/1962	10/01/1962	03/01/1977
Dounreay PFR	Fast breeder reactor	234 MW	250 MW	01/01/1966	01/10/1975	07/01/1976	March 31, 1994

swell

1. ↑ St. Galler Tagblatt, February 10, 1998, article "Fast breeders are currently not necessary"
2. ↑ Researched and invented - Silent nuclear accident. Die Zeit Nr. 28, June 7, 1995 ( online  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. )  
3. ↑ Blair's Tricks and the Dounreay Test Case. The Time No. 25, 1998
4. ↑ Dounreay chiefs played down major blast at plant. The Scotsman, July 14, 2005 ( online )
5. ↑ Daring Mixture , Der Spiegel 1/1998, p. 140
6. ↑ DBE GmbH: Worldwide activities ( Memento of the original from August 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Power Reactor Information System of the IAEA (English)

Web links

• Dounreay Site Restoration Limited , Operator
• Nuclear Decommissioning Authority , owner
• Geek's Guide to Britain , 2016 Come on kids, let's go play in the abandoned nuclear power station