The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority Mission Progress Report 2023
7th November 2023
This report shows the progress being made against the NDA mission to decommission the UK's earliest nuclear sites safely, securely and cost effectively.
The NDA Mission Progress Report (MPR) demonstrates the progress being made across the NDA group since 2005, and how much work there is left to do over the next 120-plus years.
‘Progress' is described as the work being done in four important areas to reduce the hazards at our sites. Those areas are set out in our Strategy:
spent fuel
nuclear materials
integrated waste management
site decommissioning and remediation.
There are many different ways in which the Report describes the progress we've made. Some of those include how many buildings we've demolished, how much fuel we've reprocessed and how much waste we've treated and stored. We’ve used the same metrics for land, buildings and nuclear inventory, providing a clearer and more consistent picture for people to understand.
The following milestones were all completed in the financial year 2022 to 2023 thanks to reprocessing coming to an end:
All Magnox reprocessing completed
All exotic fuel reprocessing completed
All plutonium produced
All uranium produced
This means we have now completed 8 of our 47 strategic outcomes.
A number of very early experimental reactors tested novel kinds of fuel, producing spent fuel with distinctive characteristics. There is
a much smaller quantity of these diverse,non-standard types compared to oxide and Magnox fuels, and they are collectively known as Spent exotic fuels. Only one reactor still contains exotic fuel - the Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR).
