On Wednesday 27th January, PhD students from the University of Manchester who are working as part of a collaborative arrangement sponsored by Sellafield Ltd had the opportunity to present their work to Sellafield Ltd and National Nuclear Laboratory staff at the annual Sellafield Review Day. Alongside peers from chemistry, engineering, materials science and atmospheric science were Manchester Geomicro’s own Josh Weatherill, Ellen Winstanley, Lynn Foster, Julija Konovalovaite and myself. It was a chance to showcase research carried out at the university in the fields of decontamination and effluents treatment at Sellafield. This work combines fundamental scientific research with site specific cases to combat issues being faced during the decommissioning of the UK’s nuclear legacy.
Josh showcasing the Chemostat, used to mimic the conditions within EARPJosh and Ellen’s work on the Enhanced Actinide Removal Process (EARP) provides a good example of this: it has improved understanding of the process in ways relevant both the existing effluent feed and to the future requirement for a broader and less predictable feed envelope as reprocessing effluent is replaced by post operational clean out and decommissioning feeds. Julija and Lynn’s work will improve understanding of the causes and control of microbiological blooms, which sporadically reduce the visibility in legacy ponds and can hamper waste retrieval operations. My own work seeks to understand the behaviour of colloids, which might lead to increased environmental discharges during sludge retrieval.
Lynn’s research focuses on understanding microbial growth in radioactive alkaline waters
The scope of the research being carried out led to a variety of different talks and emphasised the technical and scientific challenges that are being faced as Sellafield transitions from nuclear fuel reprocessing to post-operational clean-out and decommissioning. The meeting offered a great chance to network with representatives from Sellafield Ltd and National Nuclear Laboratory as well as catch up with the progression of my fellow researchers’ work.
By Thomas Neill
The microorganisms that inhabit the spent nuclear fuel ponds (SNFPs) at the Sellafield site have been studied for over a decade using DNA-based techniques. By sampling the pond water, extracting DNA, and analysing it using Next Generation Sequencing, it is possible to identify the whole microbial community present in the SNFPs. The microorganisms that colonise […]
Hello! I’m Alison, I come from a town called Solihull in the West Midlands. I completed my undergraduate MSci (Hons) degree in geology from the University of Birmingham, specialising in the geochemistry of metasomatic fluid-rock interaction within an igneous complex. After graduating I spent some time in the Prairies of Canada, studying the controls on […]
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The first Women in Environmental Science (WiES) workshop was hosted by the University of Manchester last 13th of June. Dozens of attendants participated in this event; a vast majority of them were women, although the event did not discriminate any gender. Moreover, women from all sorts of environmentally-related backgrounds participated, from academy to industry. There […]