The DISTINCTIVE consortium, focused on nuclear decommissioning and waste management, has won a Royal Society for Chemistry award for industry-academia collaboration.
This EPSRC-funded consortium, led by the University of Leeds, was set up to deliver research that addressed challenges associated with the continuing safe storage and disposal of radioactive legacy nuclear waste. The University of Bristol was one of the 10 academic partners, with PhD and other research projects undertaken within the School of Physics, led by Dr Ross Springell and Professor Tom Scott.
DISTINCTIVE Consortium
The DISTINCTIVE (Decommissioning, Immobilisation and Storage soluTIons for NuClear wasTe InVEntories) consortium ran between 2014 and 2018 with 10 academic and three industrial partner organisations.
Led by the University of Leeds, other academic partners were the Universities of: Bristol, Birmingham, Imperial College London, Lancaster, Loughborough, Manchester, Sheffield, Strathclyde, University College London and Surrey. The main industrial partners in the consortium were the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Sellafield Ltd. and the National Nuclear Laboratory.
Further research with TRANSCEND and ATLANTIC
The work of DISTINCTIVE is now being built on by new research undertaken by the TRANSCEND and ATLANTIC consortia, which are also EPSRC-funded research programmes. The work of the TRANSCEND consortium continues and extends the work undertaken in DISTINCTIVE with increased breadth, particularly in bringing together the academic and industrial communities to take more of a whole lifecycle approach to decommissioning and waste management.
Speaking about the announcement, Dr Ross Springell commented: “I’m glad to see a really positive message from the Royal Society of Chemistry, highlighting the strength of nuclear research in the UK.
The DISTINCTIVE, now TRANSCEND, consortium of world-leading academics and industrialists, work hand-in-hand to solve the most complex decommissioning issues, enabling the UK and the rest of the world to deal with nuclear waste and decommissioning as efficiently and as safely as possible.”