Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant B570

 nuclear reprocessing site  Add category

The Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, or THORP, is a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, England. THORP is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and operated by Sellafield Ltd (which is the site licensee company). Spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors is reprocessed to separate the 96% uranium and the 1% plutonium, which can be reused in mixed oxide fuel, from the 3% radioactive wastes, which are treated and stored at the plant. The uranium is then made available for customers to be manufactured into new fuel.

The construction of Thorp was one of the world’s most complex civil engineering projects employing up to 5,000 contractors on site and supporting a further 10,000 with suppliers and subcontractors. Construction began on the Thorp Head End and Chemical Separation plants in 1985 and the first fuel was sheared in 1994.

Thorp’s operations are divided into three main areas:
Fuel Receipt and Storage
Head End plant operations where spent fuel is chopped up and dissolved in nitric acid
Chemical Separation where uranium, plutonium and waste products are separated out.

Thorp has dispatched over 1,200 tonnes of uranium for customers to recycle back into new fuel, this will save more than 14 million tonnes of CO2 from fossil fuel generation.

www.sellafieldsites.com/operations/spent-fuel-managemen...