PHOENIX - EM, Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) and United Kingdom nuclear cleanup organizations agreed to develop more tangible collaborative projects at their recent 16th Standing Committee Meeting at the 2017 Waste Management Symposia.
Participants agreed that tangible projects better leverage the excellent long-term U.S-U.K. relationships and maximize the collaboration's financial and technical benefits.
“The U.S. and U.K. 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 five years," said Ana Han, head of EM’s International Program.
Han referred to the recent renewal of the trilateral Statement of Intent (SOI) by EM and the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) through March 2022.
Adrian Simper, NDA’s director of technology and strategy, said tangible projects bring the most value.
“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," he said.
Keith Miller, head of marketing and export controls for NNL, praised the continued U.S.-U.K. collaboration and noted its importance.
“The outstanding collaboration between the U.S. and the U.K. continues across a broad range of activities and includes the best from industry, academia and government. These collaborations deliver real benefits in reducing baseline costs and schedule timescales."
At the meeting, representatives from EM, SRNL, NNL, NDA and its subsidiaries RWM Ltd and Sellafield Ltd., and the U.K. Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy discussed current collaborative activities among the organizations under the SOI. Those activities focus on startup and commissioning; aging infrastructure management; and robotics and remote technology development and implementation.
Since the SOI’s inception in 2007, the U.S. and U.K. organizations have held numerous information and lessons learned exchanges on a variety of topics, from contracting strategies to plutonium management. The two countries’ cleanup programs are of similar scale and complexity and benefit from leveraging operational experiences and technologies.
The 17th Standing Committee Meeting is scheduled to take place in Manchester, England in November.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Environmental Management
