The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) announced the opening yesterday of “Scotland’s newest centre for teaching the skills needed to clean up the country’s nuclear heritage” – the 300 000-pound (GBP) Learning, Education and Development (LEAD) Centre.
UKAEA said the LEAD Centre would provide “high-quality training and skills opportunities” for employees of UKAEA and its contractors at Dounreay and other nuclear sites in the UK currently being decommissioned. Run by a staff of 21, the LEAD Centre is to provide a range of courses and development opportunities for decommissioning workers to expand their skills. Courses range from compulsory site induction to IT, project management, industrial and radiological safety and graduate development.
Dounreay director Norman Harrison said: “Restoring the environment of a site as complex as Dounreay is UKAEA’s biggest challenge yet. This investment underlines UKAEA’s commitment to establishing Dounreay and Caithness as the leading centre for training and development in the skills we need, not just here at Dounreay but throughout the UK as well.”
Dounreay was the UK’s centre of fast reactor research and development from 1955 until 1994. Three nuclear reactors, fuel reprocessing and other associated nuclear facilities were built and operated on a 140-acre (approximately 57-hectare) site. The site is now being decommissioned at an estimated total cost in the region of GBP 4 billion [see also News No. 81, 5th April 2004].
A former three-storey office block known as D8538 has been converted to create the LEAD Centre. It replaces the Dounreay Education and Training Centre, which is being demolished as part of the decommissioning of the nearby PUMA criticality test cell.
