LLWR at Drigg Operational Environmental Safety Case
Project: LLWR at Drigg Operational Environmental Safety Case
Client: British Nuclear Fuels plc
The Challenge
As the UK’s only low level radioactive waste facility, the continued operation of the Low Level Waste Repository (LLWR) at Drigg is essential, accepting waste from the nuclear installations, industry, research institutes and hospitals. To support the authorisation of the LLWR, it is necessary to assess the potential impacts of the associated operations on humans and the environment as a whole.
By definition, an Operational Environmental Safety Case must comprise defensible dose assessment calculations for all perceivable routes from the LLWR to the receiving environment during its operational phase.
The Solution
Combining our in-depth understanding of the environmental setting at Drigg with our client’s knowledge of operations at the LLWR, we were able to:
- establish potentially exposed groups;
- construct a suite of risk scenarios;
- use environmental monitoring data to calculate radionuclide concentrations available to humans and biota drinking surface water emanating from the LLWR;
- apply industry standard dispersion models to predict radionuclide concentrations resulting from aerial and marine discharges;
- predict radionuclide concentrations in groundwater and employ a bespoke contaminant transport model to calculate concentrations likely to reach the site perimeter, at the location of an hypothetical abstraction well;
- calculate the potential doses to humans via each risk scenario;
- estimate the impact of discharges from the LLWR on local biota in freshwater, marine, coastal and terrestrial environments.
The Benefits
- The impact assessments we have provided have been accepted by the regulator as a sound basis for the Authorisation reviews.
- Our client has been able to negotiate with the regulator from a firm scientific base and maintain the necessary licences to continue operations at the site.