Nuclear Archive Plans Move Forward

9th December 2014

Public consultation continues on NDA's plan for a nuclear archive at Wick in Scotland. It will house over 70 years' worth of historic information from across UK's civil nuclear industry.

The start of the 12-week planning consultation process was marked by an exhibition of architects' plans and mock-ups and opportunities for face-to-face dialogue with the project team.

Scores of visitors called in during the event, held in Wick, including residents, businesses, council representatives and other organisations.

The consultation will be followed by submission of an application for planning permission to Highland Council in January 2015.

The NDA archive is being developed in partnership with Highland Council, whose own North Highland Archive records will also be housed in the facility.

Separately, the procurement exercises are also under way to appoint a commercial partner who will operate the archive, as well as a design and build contractor.

Potentially employing around 20 full-time staff, the archive will bring together vast numbers of records, plans, photographs, drawings and other important information dating as far back as Second World War, that are currently stored in various locations around the country.

Much of the information will eventually be digitised and made available for electronic research, and to support the ongoing decommissioning mission.

Some of the material is currently held in buildings scheduled for demolition as sites are decommissioned, while some is also stored in off-site locations. Sellafield, the NDA’s largest site, is estimated to hold more than 50% of all the records in numerous stores, while at least of 80,000 archive boxes are held in commercial storage facilities.

The Wick facility will also be developed as a base for training archivists, potentially offering apprenticeships, linking up with the University of the Highlands and Islands and the local community.

NDA is also committed to working with other regional heritage centres around the country.

Dounreay’s old news becomes history
Archivist Gordon Reid welcomed the addition and is pictured receiving a sample of the items with, from left, DSRL’s Dounreay News Editor Sue Thompson, Heritage Officer James Gunn, archivist Ian Pearson and NDA’s Stakeholder Relations and Ssocio-Economic Manager Anna MacConnell.
Archivist Gordon Reid welcomed the addition and is pictured receiving a sample of the items with, from left, DSRL’s Dounreay News Editor Sue Thompson, Heritage Officer James Gunn, archivist Ian Pearson and NDA’s Stakeholder Relations and Ssocio-Economic Manager Anna MacConnell.
Plans to archive Dounreay’s historical documents took a step forward as past issues of Dounreay News were donated to a regional archive.

The Caithness Archive Centre shares the same building as the Wick library and houses thousands of records covering regional issues such as farming, fishing, shipping, lighthouses, architecture, brewing, tourism, manufacturing, crafts such as glass-making, and, of course, the nuclear fast reactor experiment at Dounreay. The archive is available to historians, academics, students and others interested in the region’s history.

Archivist Gordon Reid welcomed the addition and is pictured receiving a sample of the items.

Information Governance Programme
The archive project is part of a much larger NDA workstream, The Information Governance Programme (IGP).

The IGP’s objective is: To maximize business value from the NDA knowledge and information assets in a compliant and secure manner.

All NDA Site Licence Companies and subsidiaries are involved.

When the NDA was established in 2005, it acquired responsibility for the huge volumes of information accrued at its sites over decades and held in a multitude of formats, as well as information yet to be produced.

As a Government body, the NDA is required to ensure this material is preserved in line with legislation on public information and that it meets the needs of the NDA estate.

The level of ‘information’ covered is extremely wide and includes:

archived operational records
plant designs
graphics
photographs
publications
digital records
intellectual property
research
documents
waste records
even the intangible professional expertise acquired by staff during their careers

The IGP will also require the safeguarding of sensitive material, the duplication and/or destruction of records where appropriate, the sharing of knowledge to support decommissioning activities, ensuring access and agreeing systems for managing the information in both digital and hard-copy formats into the future.

The NDA’s Head of Information Governance Simon Tucker is leading the IGP, which has been in the planning phase for nine years and will continue for many years to come.