New storage facility at Sellafield takes another step forward

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This month the £1.5 billion Box Encapsulation Plant (BEP) handed over its waste treatment cell to commissioning, completing its biggest milestone to date and ahead of schedule.

The facility will be vital in supporting delivery of the Sellafield vision by taking waste from the site’s legacy facilities and packaging it for interim storage and final disposal” said Bill Holmes, BEP joint venture, project director.

This year is instrumental as we hand over two of our largest and most complex areas to start proving the plant and equipment through testing.
Chris Harrop, BEP joint venture, delivery manager said,

The waste treatment cell will be a fully remote processing cell. It is equipped with two state of the art Kuka robots and will be the main repackaging hub of the plant.

This has been a challenging campaign as the milestone includes not only handover of the cell but numerous associated systems and rooms,” he continued. “This is effectively many milestones rolled into one and success is purely down to the dedication and skill of the project team.

The second handover of this type will be that of the box operations cell, planned for April 2024. This area will provide a central hub for receiving, preparing and distributing waste containers.

This is such an important year for the project,” said Bill. “As we begin testing to prove the technology and integration of some of the most critical process in two of the most vital elements of the plant, we are confident in our project team to deliver against a wider inactive commissioning schedule by the end of 2025.
Andy Sharples, projects director for Sellafield Ltd said:

This is an incredible achievement and the Box Encapsulation Plant team deserve a lot of credit for the commitment and hard work in ensuring we deliver this milestone

I can’t thank the team enough and I hope they take great pride in the fact that, even when challenges arose, they didn’t take their eye off the mission, safely and professionally getting us to this point.