News story: UK and US continue collaborative nuclear agreement

On March 8 2017, the 16th Standing Committee Meeting was held on the fringes of the annual Waste Management Conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

The meeting included members of the US Department of Energy (DOE) Environmental Management (EM), Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and its subsidiaries RWM and Sellafield Ltd along with the UK National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) and the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. They discussed the current collaborative activities between the organisations under the DOE/NDA/NNL trilateral Statement of Intent (SOI).

The SOI has been in place since 2007 and was recently renewed for a further 5 years through to March 2022. Since its inception, numerous information and lessons learned exchanges have taken place under the auspices of the SOI on a wide variety of topics ranging from contracting strategies to plutonium management. Current activities are focused on start-up and commissioning, aging infrastructure management and robotics/remote technology development and implementation.

All participants agreed that, going forward, they will focus more effort on developing tangible collaborative projects to better leverage the excellent long term relationships that have been formed and maximise the financial and technical benefit of the arrangement on both sides of the Atlantic.

Adrian Simper, Director of Technology and Strategy at the NDA, said:

The intangible benefits of this relationship have been excellent in terms of the sharing of know-how and lessons learned but to get the greatest value out of the partnership, we need to identify some tangible projects where we can pool our resources and expertise.

Ana Han, Head of US Department of Energy (DOE) Environmental Management’s International Program said:

The US/UK collaboration continues to set the benchmark for other government-to-government collaborative efforts but we both know that we can do better and that will be the focus of effort over the next 5 years.

The 17th Standing Committee Meeting is planned to take place in Manchester in November in the margins of the NDA Estate Supply Chain Event.