UK Radioactive Waste Inventory

Radioactive waste in the United Kingdom

⁽¹⁾  Future arisings of HLW have negative volumes. This is because Sellafield has reported future arisings of HLW to show that the volume of accumulated waste (liquid plus vitrified product) will fall as liquid waste existing at 1 April 2010 and forecast in the future is conditioned to a vitrified product.

Radioactive waste is managed on 36 sites in the UK that include:

• operating nuclear power stations at nine sites – Magnox reactor stations at Oldbury and Wylfa, Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGR) stations at Dungeness, Hinkley Point, Hartlepool, Hunterston, Torness and Heysham, and a Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) station at Sizewell;
• shut down Magnox reactor stations undergoing decommissioning at nine sites – Berkeley, Bradwell, Calder Hall, Dungeness, Hinkley Point, Trawsfynydd, Chapelcross, Hunterston, and Sizewell;
• facilities supporting the civil nuclear fuel cycle at three sites - Capenhurst, Sellafield and Springfields;
• four nuclear research and development sites, where the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is undertaking facility decommissioning and site clean up – Harwell, Windscale, Dounreay and Winfrith;
• the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion facility located at Culham;
• ten sites owned by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which undertake operations in support of the atomic weapons programme (Aldermaston), the nuclear submarine propulsion programme (Barrow-in-Furness, Derby, HMNB Devonport, Clyde, Rosyth and Vulcan) and other activities (Donnington, Eskmeals and HMNB Portsmouth);
• the health science company GE Healthcare operates from three sites in the UK – Amersham, Cardiff and Harwell;
• the site at Sheffield is storing a small quantity of waste from the accidental smelting of radioactive materials in a steel manufacturing plant;
• the national disposal facility for LLW in Cumbria (i.e. the LLWR).
  
  

⁽¹⁾ The organisation with strategic responsibility for radioactive wastes managed on the site.
⁽²⁾ Although the Culham site is currently owned and operated by UKAEA, the NDA understands that the part of the site occupied by the JET facility will transfer to NDA ownership from the date when JET operation ceases.