The November issue of the site newspaper, Dounreay News, has now been published and is also available online. www.dounreay.com/news/2010-11-03/dounreay-site-newspaper-for-november-online .
Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd recently welcomed an announcement about how much public money will be available to continue nuclear clean-up in the UK. DSRL manages the closure of the site on behalf of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which today confirmed that its total expenditure, including income generated, would be maintained at current levels of around £3bn a year.
Casualty star Ronnie McCann is helping workers at Dounreay stay out of real-life accident and emergency units. The actor, who appeared 43 times in the BBC series as nurse Barney Woolfe, has been treading the boards as part of European Safety Week at the site of Britain's biggest nuclear decommissioning project.
More than 270 fragments of nuclear fuel have been recovered from the seabed since the latest phase of offshore clean-up got underway at the start of August. Of the 279 recovered to date, 40 fragments have been categorised as a "significant risk" to health, with the remainder falling into lower levels of radioactivity.
Escape Business Technologies has secured a contract worth up to £100,000 with the Pentland Housing Association in Caithness. This is the first new contract to be secured by the firm's Caithness office, recently launched to serve the growing Highland business community.
Dounreay is being demolished at a rate of 100 sq. ft.
For the past year Northern Constabulary has been working on a dedicated project to make the Special Constabulary even more special. The forcewide project has been running since June last year.
DSRL is updating staff, trade unions and key stakeholders about the latest forecasts for continued planned reductions in its workforce as more of the site is decommissioned. Staffing levels at the site licence company have dropped from a peak of just under 1300 in 2005 to approximately 970 today as the hazard has reduced.
Pentland Alliance, the joint venture comprising AMEC, CH2M HILL and UKAEA/Babcock, is to sponsor an important apprentice skills programme for the Caithness region in the north of Scotland. The sponsorship was announced on Thursday, February 11th in Manchester at the National Skills Academy for Nuclear/Cogent Annual Skills Awards Dinner.
Dounreay was the centre of the UK's fast reactor research and development programme from 1955 until 1994, and is now Scotland's largest nuclear clean-up and demolition project. By 2025, DSRL expects to have completed the decommissioning of the site.
The latest edition of Dounreay News is available at http://www.dounreay.com/news-room/dounreay-news Always packed with photos of past events and current activities at the site..
Emissions from a plant built to destroy one of Britain's biggest environmental hazards have been up to 4000 times cleaner than its designers expected. Engineers believed they could reduce the levels of radioactivity in effluent from a new liquid metal destruction plant by up to a thousand times at most.
A Caithness and Sutherland charity which helps hundreds of local people every year who are facing hardship is expanding its services. Homeaid, which redistributes donated household items to the elderly and low income residents, is planning to buy a shop in Wick and extend its warehouse in Thurso.
Within a few years, much of the experimental nuclear site at Dounreay will disappear from the landscape. Many of the facilities that have dominated the skyline of Scotland's north coast for the past 50 years will be razed to the ground.
It was Britain's man-on-the-moon moment, when a decade of scientific and engineering breakthroughs culminated in the most advanced nuclear plant in the world. A workforce of 3000 had laboured around the clock for four years to build the experimental plant that would pave the way for electricity "too cheap to meter".
Commenting upon reports by Reuters last week that the Crown Estate will announce seabed leases for the Pentland Firth development in February 2010, Trudy Morris, Chief Executive of Caithness Chamber of Commerce said: "We are extremely concerned by this delay. We were told back in August that conclusion of seabed leases would happen in the autumn.
Third time's a charm for Chief Inspector Matthew Reiss as he returns to Caithness, Sutherland and East Ross as Area Commander They say third time's a charm and that's certainly true for Chief Inspector Matthew Reiss as he returns to his favourite area of the Force next month. The newly promoted Chief Inspector takes over the role of Area Commander for Caithness, Sutherland and East Ross on November 2 following the recent departure of his predecessor Chief Inspector Andy Brown.
A decommissioning team is getting ready to look inside an underground bunker where intermediate-level radioactive waste has lain submerged in water for almost 40 years. Two remotely-operated cameras will penetrate the concrete-lined vault in preparation for work starting to clean out its hazardous contents.
Scottish companies are marketing their expertise in nuclear decommissioning to delegates from seven countries that are in Scotland to learn how the country is dismantling its nuclear heritage. The visit is being seen as an opportunity for companies in Scotland to gain a bigger share of a global market worth hundreds of billions over the next few decades.
Two small areas of radioactive contamination have been detected during a survey of grazing land adjacent to the former nuclear research site at Dounreay. They were excavated and removed to the site for analysis.