Sellafield employee starts decommissioning PhD at Manchester

The University's Dalton Nuclear Institute has strengthened its working relationship with Sellafield Ltd - the company charged with managing and operating the Sellafield site - with a key member of staff starting work on a unique PhD in Manchester.

Heather Moore, who is a key player in formulating the future decommissioning strategies at Sellafield is embarking upon postgraduate studies in Decommissioning Modelling.

Heather, from the Decommissioning Technical team at Sellafield, will be undertaking research into a new type of decommissioning business model in support of future decommissioning and the overall strategy for the Cumbria site.

Heather will be researching a new business model that stems from an idea formulated by Professor Bernard Kelly, the Chair in Nuclear Decommissioning Engineering at The University.

The idea is to create a model which can be used for the entire decommissioning process on the Sellafield site. The process will generate outputs to show things such as schedule, cost, resources required and waste.

The evolution of current and future technologies used to decommission the facilities at Sellafield is being led by Dr Steve Hepworth, Manager of the Decommissioning Technical team. To achieve this successfully partnerships between Decommissioning, academia and the supply chain, will be vital, and Heather's work will play a key role in their development.

Dr Paul Mort, Head of Decommissioning Support, further explained. He said: "A model of this kind is required to link together known and assumed decommissioning data in order to predict the downstream effects over time on such outputs as cost, waste volumes and resource requirements."

Notes to editors

A photograph is available on request.

For more information please contact Alex Waddington, Media Relations Officer, The University of Manchester, Tel 0161 275 8387.