Nuclear cloud: UK's reactor cleanup crew awards Softcat reseller deal for Microsoft licences, Azure services

The UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has awarded a £33.6m contract to London Stock Exchange-listed reseller Softcat for Microsoft software licences and Azure cloud services. The NDA, which is responsible for cleaning up the UK's earliest nuclear sites safely, securely and, er, cost-effectively, has signed the five- …

[Anonymous Coward]

good luck

"The NDA is in the middle of a tussle to demonstrate value for money. Its most recent estimate is that it will cost current and future generations of taxpayers £132bn to decommission the civil nuclear sites, with the work not being completed for another 120 years."

Good luck with that as I don't think anyone has yet managed to decontaminate totally a graphite based nuclear reactor, be it the RBMK soviet type (no, I don't consider the Tchernobyl one as being decontaminated !), the UK Magnox type, nor the french UNGG type.

[Mishak]

Re: good luck

There are no plans to decontaminate the graphite as such, but it will be disposed of safely.

The WAGR (prototype for the UK's AGR reactor fleet) was a graphite-cored reactor that was safely decommissioned about 10 years ago - see here

[BOFH in Training]

You can predict costs for next 120 years?

Are you sure you can predict costs for the next 120 years, with unknown amount of changes coming up on the world, economy, region, country, etc?

Are we even capable of running a project which lasts for more then a century, needing 3 generations to finish up? Not to mention the inevitable delays, etc.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: You can predict costs for next 120 years?

There is a methodology for that called MUAYGA or make up as you go along.

[Alumoi]

Re: You can predict costs for next 120 years?

Please it's SWAG. And no, S stands for Sophisticated, not Scientific

[deadlockvictim]

Downtime

Hopefully none of these nuclear facilities will be so reliant on Azure, that when Azure has its one-day hickup sometime in the not-too-distant fture, that nothing untoward happens. Because, if there is something that we all have learnt, is that Microsoft likes companies being dependant on its services.

[Duncan Macdonald]

Simple way to make Magnox/AGR reactors and their spent fuel safe

Once the fuel rods have been removed, fill the whole of the reactor with concrete and surround the reactor with a further 20 feet of concrete then use bulldozers to create a small hill over the solid concrete lump. The bill per reactor should be well under £100 million using this approach.

As for the spent fuel rods, after 20 years in a cooling pond their heat production is low. They can be safely embedded in waterproof concrete in a deep mine (UK mainland) or a shallow excavation (100 ft deep) (uninhabited island off the coast of the UK). Either way if the fuel rods are encased in 20 feet of concrete or more then the chance of significant release of radioactive material is effectively zero.

This would leave a small artificial hill at the site of each reactor but this is a good exchange for reducing the total bill by over £100 billion.

(Using the Roman concrete formulation with volcanic ash and saltwater can produce a concrete that resists seawater for over 1000 years.)

[Mishak]

Re: Simple way to make Magnox/AGR reactors and their spent fuel safe

Some of the products in spent fuel remain toxic for hundreds of thousands of years (some of the plutonium isotopes, for example) and will require proper geological disposal (using current methods). You also have to put them out-of-reach of terrorists and the like.

The best way of dealing with the "waste" fuel is to recycle it and use it as fuel. The UK used to recycle its fuel, but stopped doing that a while back now. Putting recycled fuel into fast-breeder type reactors (the UK was one of the first into this technology, but gave in in the 70's - I think) is also another possibility as that "burns" a lot of what would otherwise end up as waste. If that's done, then about 96% of the waste is reused, with the remaining 4% only needing to be stored for about 1000 years before it is no more harmful than the uranium ore from which it was produced.

[Duncan Macdonald]

Re: Simple way to make Magnox/AGR reactors and their spent fuel safe

Toxic - yes but the long life isotopes are less of a problem than materials such as mercury that will remain toxic for ever. Having the materials inside 20 feet of waterproof concrete in either a deep mine (1000 feet down) on the UK mainland or on an uninhabited island 100 feet down is enough to keep the human exposure below that experienced by people in many parts of Cornwall. (The granite rocks that make up part of Cornwall have small amounts of Uranium in them.)

[Ken Moorhouse]

Re: waterproof concrete

How quickly this can be eroded by other materials brushing against it is open to conjecture. We all know how well cladding materials are tested before being used for building projects (not concrete I do realise). Then there were the years gone by where it was considered acceptable to embed iron pipes in concrete.

[NeilPost]

Re: Simple way to make Magnox/AGR reactors and their spent fuel safe

Why not just load on a rocket and shoot the fuel rods into the Sun. or have a nuclear dump on the Moon - Space 1999… pah !!!

Job done.

[Pascal Monett]

Cost-effective ?

For a government project ?

BWA HAA HA HA HAA HAAA HA HAAAAA !

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

[Ken Moorhouse]

UK Nuclear Decommissioning awarded Microsoft contract

Words that trouble me, seeing them together in the same sentence (see icon).

[Alumoi]

Nuclear rector and cloud

What could go wrong?

[Velv]

"The annual budget for the NDA stretches to £3.2bn to clean up the UK's ageing nuclear reactor estate, £2.4bn of which is funded by the government."

Remind me again how Nuclear energy is so cheap given the clean up typically takes 50 years per site?