Planning and Preparation: In conversation with Paul Tuohy

Paul Tuohy is our Director of Strategy and Waste. He highlights the development of a Group Waste Model (GWM) as a major step to inform enhanced decisions about waste management.

As part of effective planning and preparation, a collaborative and integrated approach to nuclear waste management is vital.

The IWMP provides a platform to bring the NDA group and wider industry together to improve radioactive waste management by addressing gaps and introducing new technologies and capabilities though a more joined-up approach.

We are now at a stage in the programme where we want to develop these efficiencies and use the appropriate skills, the right technologies, and share learnings from right across the industry.

We’re doing this with the Asbestos Innovation Partnership (see case study) where we, alongside the NDA, have engaged the supply chain and recruited two consortia to develop innovative solutions and techniques to better manage asbestos waste.

Another great example is our work on the GWM. The model was first commissioned back in 2019 to help identify NDA group opportunities and enhance understanding about the implications of decisions across the whole waste system.

It is, in simple terms, a model that takes the entirety of the UK Radioactive Waste Inventory, along with a set of rules, and simulates the packaging, treatment, storage, and disposal of the UK’s nuclear waste.

Generating the baseline for the UK’s nuclear waste, and then reflecting strategic changes across a range of scenarios, enables broader understanding of the waste management capabilities and needs across multiple sites and time horizons.

There are so many benefits to taking a modelling and simulation approach to planning and preparation. The NDA group can: gain insight and understanding about the overall system and the interaction between its parts; estimate the impact of change without making changes in the real world – reducing cost and risk; inform decisions about a system before it exists; and understand the impact of uncertainty.

We are developing the baselines and the model on behalf of the NDA group. In the near term, the GWM will be used to support the analysis of strategic options. Longer term, we are planning for it to be used to support NDA group business cases.

Paul Tuohy, Director of Strategy and Waste at Nuclear Waste Services