An Environmental Response Handbook for BNFL Sites

The BNFL Group of Companies owns and operates a number of nuclear licensed sites worldwide. These cover fuel manufacture and reactor services, power reactors, spent fuel management, and nuclear decommissioning and clean-up. To implement its environmental policy, BNFL needs to have tools and techniques to permit it to respond appropriately to Environmental Trigger Events (ETEs). Similarly, BNFL needs to provide assurance that it is able to manage contaminated land in the short to medium term (prior to site closure) — although such tools/techniques could also be used afterward. To meet this challenge, BNFL has developed the Environmental Response Handbook (ERH), with the main themes of: • Global considerations for remediation on an operational site; • Detailed consideration of the application of remediation to the current ETE; • A maintained ‘toolkit’ of favoured remediation techniques; and • Case studies and action plans. The history of development of the ERH was presented at the Waste Management ’02 Conference. This paper builds on this previously presented information. It details the structure and operation of the ERH with reference to a case study. The case study is used to demonstrate how the ERH would be applied in practice.