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Developing Our Strategy

You can understand how we control and manage the development of our strategy by reading our short guide:

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Home > Our Strategy > Nuclear Materials > Plutonium  

Plutonium

Last Updated: 31 August 2010

Current Stage of Strategy Development

Additional Information

Credible options for a new strategy are being considered by Government.

The current strategy of continued storage is being implemented. We anticipate assessment and selection of an interim option.

Plutonium is separated from irradiated nuclear fuel by reprocessing and is currently kept in secure storage pending a future decision on its disposition.

PDF NDA Plutonium Topic Strategy - Current Position January 2009 (100kb)

Objective

To ensure the safe management then ultimate disposition of UK owned plutonium.

Scope and Boundaries

This Topic Strategy relates to the UK civil plutonium stockpile belonging to NDA and British Energy. It does not include plutonium owned by the Ministry of Defence or plutonium owned by overseas utilities which is destined for return to them.  Similarly it does not include the conversion of plutonium bearing material to a solid form.

Interfaces

The plutonium strategy interfaces with a number of other topics including:

Credible Options

At a high level, the strategic options and corresponding sub-options that apply to plutonium are:

1   Long-term storage followed by disposition

2   Interim store, condition for direct disposal as waste

2.1        Dispose as low specification Mixed Oxide fuel (MOX)

2.2        Dispose in a ceramic matrix

2.3        Dispose in the form of vitrified waste

2.4        Dispose in a cement matrix

3    Interim store followed by reuse and disposal as spent fuel

3.1        Direct sale or lease of plutonium

3.2        Produce MOX fuel using an existing or new fabrication plant

Current Position

The current strategy is for separated plutonium to be stored indefinitely pending a future decision on its disposition.

The current strategy is to safely and securely store separated plutonium.Work is progressing in accordance with the gated process of the NDA Strategy Management System (SMS) to develop a sustainable strategy for approval by Government which will allow the NDA to deliver its remit. 

Stakeholder Engagement on Plutonium  

There has been extensive engagement on the development of options with a broad range of stakeholders including:

  • Government
  • regulators
  • Non-Governmental Organisations
  • nuclear industry and
  • the public.

A plutonium options paper was subject to public consultation during summer 2008 and a credible options paper has been submitted to Government for consideration.

This has been followed by the publication of a discussion paper by Government on the options for the long term management of plutonium.

We analysed the responses from stakeholders and fed back the views we received, incorporating them into the advice that we provided to Government in:

PDF NDA Plutonium Topic Strategy - Credible Options Technical Analysis January 2009 (1.14mb)

We developed the series of credible options, based on stakeholder engagement with:

  • Nuclear Materials Sub-group of the National Stakeholder Group
  • Regulators; and
  • Government departments. 

October and November 2008

Workshop - Plutonium options

We sought more industry data to support our options analysis to underpin the technical assumptions we have made. We also wanted to understand if the approach we are taking in terms of defining and analysing the credible options is reasonable i.e.

  • what we should be taking into consideration when we are analysing the options
  • where we have made assumptions that involve value judgements that these are sensible 

August - October 2008

Online consultation - Plutonium Options

We welcomed comment on our draft plutonium options paper. Closing date for submitting comments was 8 October 2008.

PDF NDA Plutonium Options for Comment August 2008 (400Kb) 

June 2008

Plutonium Disposition Technical Meeting

People from industry, Government Departments and Regulators met to engage over the technical assumptions that we had made. They told us that we needed to do some more work in understanding the impact of the repository costs on the options and on assessing the levels of uncertainty associated with potential solutions.

The output from that workshop was available for comment from August until October 2008. 

2006 - 2007

Nuclear Materials Issue Group

A sub-group of the National Stakeholder Group advised that we should model the environmental (CO2 and radiotoxicity) and socio-economic impacts of each of the plutonium options in addition to the macro-economics. We built this into the model and it forms part of the analysis on credible options. 

2005 - 2008

Sub Group of Senior Regulatory Forum

A number of Regulators and Government departments were engaged through a sub-group of the senior regulatory forum. They had input into the modelling approach and the definition of credible options.