Promoted content: Engineering opportunities in Magnox decommissioning

In the 1950s and 1960s, when the UK’s Magnox nuclear reactors were first built, their developers had a simple plan for their eventual decommissioning.

The idea was to remove the fuel from each of the sites, and then simply cover the entire site with soil, creating a man-made hill at each location.

Since then, health and safety standards have become somewhat more stringent, and the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is now faced with the significant task of safely decommissioning and completely dismantling each of the Magnox sites.

There are 12 Magnox sites across the Magnox estate, including 10 generating plants and two research centres. The name Magnox comes from the magnesium-aluminium alloy used to clad the fuel rods inside the gas-cooled reactors.

In July 2018 the NDA announced that Magnox would become a subsidiary of the NDA organisation from September 2019. The decision followed an announcement in 2017 that the NDA was terminating its contract with Cavendish Fluor Partnership to decommission the Magnox sites.