Proposal to characterise legacy Sellafield ponds using SONAR and RadLine™

Abstract

Sellafield Nuclear Reprocessing Plant in Cumbria contains storage ponds built in the 1950s which was originally intended to hold spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing, and eventual production of weapons grade plutonium. Parts of the spent fuel have corroded; some are buried under a layer of sediment or intertwined with other debris and removal and destruction of this nuclear waste is not a trivial task due to elevated radiation levels. We propose a system in collaboration with the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) to characterise the ponds using a system containing three main parts; an ultrasonic SONAR system used to physically map the pond, scintillator based radiation detector (known as RadLine™) used to map the pond from a radiation point of view, and bespoke software intended to combine the physical and radiation plots of this environment to create an overall 3D source map.