The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority

16 February 2006

The SMP plant manufactures fuel from Plutonium, separated from spent fuel in the THORP reprocessing facility, and natural or depleted uranium. The overall process efficiency is around 98%, due to the internal recycle capability within the plant.

The SMP plant is continuing active commissioning and is in the early stages of ramp up, as such the manufacturing processes are not yet mature. It is producing fuel of a good quality with early production fuel performing well in reactor.

For SMP to generate a positive economic impact, customer contracts must obviously be secured and delivered and to do this a ramp up of production capacity must be achieved over time with an ultimate target of around 40 te HM/yr. Ongoing assessments will determine the ramp up rates required.

The production plan for this year was to increase the number of fabricated assemblies by 300%. The plant has experienced a number of equipment reliability problems and some engineering programme slippage which have limited the production which is likely to be achieved this year. It is now believed that, this financial year, two thirds of the planned output will be achieved with the balance being fabricated in the early summer of 06.

As part of a comprehensive improvement programme, a detailed modelling analysis of the plant production capability for each anticipated fuel type has now been completed. For the types of fuel that are scheduled to be produced in the next few years this analysis shows that the plant production rate is likely to be around 80% of that which was planned for the LCBL2. For fuel types anticipated in future years the achievement of LCBL2 rates looks unlikely if improvements, in addition to those already planned, are not implemented.

As a result of the modelling work, packages are being executed which assess further engineering improvement opportunities and optimisation of the production schedule.

Progress has been made in addressing recent bottleneck areas. The detailed model is being used to identify future plant constraints and to target further production rate enhancement projects. It is intended that this work will be completed in the summer.

The production programme is being optimised to maximise the capability of the plant whilst minimising any impact on customer commitments. In addition the results of the modelling and potential requirements for a longer plant life are being fed into the economic model to assess the impact.

Conclusion

Although the production achieved to date is not as high as planned the expected year end out-turn rate nevertheless represents an increase of more than 100% on last year.

A significant programme of plant capacity and capability improvements is under development aimed at increasing the throughput to levels that will meet customer requirements.

The modelling work indicates that the ramp up is likely to be slower than planned and the programme is currently being examined to determine what other opportunities could be exploited.

Achievement of the original design capacity throughput rate of 120 te HM/yr is not considered feasible.