Last updated at 12:28, Friday, 17 February 2012

Construction of a new waste plant at Sellafield has taken a major step forward after assembly of a key part of the scheme was completed.

Building work has now finished on the first buffer storage vessel for the Sellafield Sludge Packing Plant.

The vessel – the biggest stainless steel fabrication assembled on the site since the 1980s – will hydraulically receive sludge from the Magnox Storage Pond.

The pond was originally built to store, cool and prepare Magnox fuel for reprocessing.

The sludge has to be retrieved from the pond floor to allow the pond to be emptied of nuclear fuel and the facility decommissioned.

Karl Mason, project manager, said: “Assembly and welding of the first tank sections was a major challenge which took 16 weeks to complete. We applied the learning from this through the fabrication process and we managed to reduce the timescale to two weeks for the final sections.”

First published at 11:26, Friday, 17 February 2012
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk