Remediation of the site of a former active handling building at UKAEA- Winfrith

Available in abstract form only. Full text of publication follows: Since July 2000, NUKEM Limited has been carrying out the decommissioning of the former Active Handling Building, A59 at Winfrith, Dorset, United Kingdom (UK) under contract from the nuclear site licence holder, United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, (UKAEA). The building contained two heavily shielded suites of caves originally used to carry out remote examination of irradiated nuclear fuel elements and other supporting facilities which have all been decontaminated ready to permit building demolition. The demolition of the building structure and the removal of one cave line was completed during 2006 and the second cave line was demolished by March 2007. The remaining operations to be completed concern removal of the building slab and remediation of underlying soils to the final end point, free for unrestricted use without planning or nuclear regulatory control. Within the building base slab there are a range of contaminated items including secondary drain pipes, filter pits, storage hole liners and ventilation ducts which all have to be recovered for disposal along with around 4,000 m{sup 3} of surrounding concrete. In order to characterise the slab before its removal, supporting information has been obtained from site investigationmore » work including a collimated low resolution, high sensitivity gamma survey using the GroundhogTM system of the foundation slab and the recovery and analysis of 27 cores obtained by drilling through the slab into the underlying soil. During removal of the slab it will be necessary to employ a variety of monitoring techniques to locate and remove the contaminated sections and then expose and monitor the underlying soil for evidence of any residual radioactivity. (authors)« less