Page 246 - Beyond Decommissioning

Experience and lessons learned 227

light industrial to residential builds without planning permission. However, this right
excludes situations subject to:
l transport and highways impacts;
l contamination risks;
l flooding risks; or
l whether the change of use would affect the provision of local industrial services
(CMS, 2017).

6.5.1 Ford reactor and building, MI, USA (U-M, 2015)
The 2-MW, pool-type University of Michigan’s (U-M) Ford reactor went critical in
1957. The reactor building consisted of thick reinforced concrete to accommodate its
reactor and the 150-m3 reactor pool of demineralized water. After 46 years of
incident-free operations, U-M permanently shut down the reactor in July 2003 as it
was little used and was costing $1 million a year to run. The cost of decommissioning
the reactor and decreasing activity levels to below the US Nuclear Regulatory Com-
mission’s release criteria was $14 million.
In December 2013, U-M’s Board of Regents approved the conceptual design for
2
the $11.4 million renovation and expansion to the four-story, 1600-m building. It will
be renamed U-M’s Nuclear Engineering Laboratories.
The inside of the building will be converted into student work areas, offices, and
labs for the engineering school’s nuclear engineering and radiological sciences
department. The department intends to use the building for research related to reac-
tor safety and homeland security. For example, a planned thermohydraulics labo-
ratory would simulate the heating around nuclear fuel bars, and new gamma-ray
camera equipment would be developed to detect nuclear materials in shipping con-
tainers or trucks. To this end, a particle accelerator will be used to produce neutrons
and gamma rays for nonproliferation studies. On the historical side, the reactor’s
original control console will be on display once the renovation is completed.

6.5.2 Georgia Tech Reactor and building, GA, USA (WM, 2001)

Located in Atlanta, the Georgia Institute of Technology is a leading research univer-
sity committed to improving the human environment through advanced science and
technology. The Frank H. Neely Nuclear Research Center, also known as the Neely
Research Reactor and the Georgia Tech Research Reactor (GTRR) was a nuclear engi
neering research center on the Georgia Institute of Technology campus, which had a
5-MW heavy-water-cooled research reactor in operation from 1961 until 1996. The
decommissioning process described here can be split into two phases: the reactor;
and the reactor building and peripheral systems.
After 30 years of reactor operations, Georgia Tech applied for a license renewal. As
a part of the license renewal, the conversion of the reactor from high-enriched fuel to
low-enriched fuel operation was planned. Because Georgia Tech was to serve as the
Olympic Village and the venue for several sporting events during the 1996 Olympics,