10 June 2024
Construction has started at the Garigliano nuclear power plant in Italy of a facility for the interim storage of wastes generated through the decommissioning of the plant, which shut down more than 40 years ago.
Construction site of the DT2 waste storage facility (Image: Sogin)
Societa Gestione Impianti Nucleari SpA (Sogin) – established in 1999 to take responsibility for decommissioning Italy’s former nuclear power sites and locating a national waste store – has now completed the laying of the foundation slab for the new DT2 storage facility.
Once completed, the DT2 facility – measuring 70 metres in length, 18 metres in width and 13 metres in height – will house about 1800 cubic metres of low and medium-level radioactive waste. This waste will exclusively come from the dismantling activities of the power plant and, in particular, from the dismantling work of the systems and components inside the reactor vessel, which began in December last year. The waste will subsequently be transferred to the national repository, once available.
This storage facility will include an operational handling area, a service building functional to the operation of the depot and a storage area equipped, among other things, with an overhead crane for the remote handling of radioactive waste containers, in which there will also be corridors for their inspection.
Civil works are scheduled to be completed in June 2025, with commissioning expected in the first half of 2026.
“This is a significant result for the advancement of the decommissioning and safe management programme of the site’s radioactive waste, which will allow the dismantling of the systems and components of the reactor building of the power plant to be completed,” Sogin said.
Garigliano, a 150 MWe boiling water reactor, was connected to the grid in January 1964 and was shut down in 1982. Italy operated a total of four nuclear power plants starting in the early 1960s, but decided to phase out nuclear power in a referendum that followed the 1986 Chernobyl accident. It closed its last two operating plants, Caorso and Trino Vercellese, in 1990. State-owned Sogin was established in 1999 to take responsibility for decommissioning Italy’s former nuclear power sites and locating a national waste store.
