What's included
Decommissioning schedules fail when they are drawn as demolition with extra paperwork. The work is gated by disposal capacity, permissions and dose, and the template is ordered that way:
- Post-operational clean-out & characterisation, Defuelling and fuel transfer off site, radiological characterisation, the legacy waste inventory and material accountancy, asbestos and hazardous material survey, and the end-state definition everything is measured against. Milestones: fuel-free status, characterisation baseline issued.
- Regulatory permissioning & waste route agreement, The dismantling safety case and hazard analysis, environmental permit variation, waste acceptance criteria agreed with the disposal facility, consignment capacity booked, and the ALARP dose budget and radiological protection plan. Milestones: permission to start dismantling, waste route confirmed.
- Ancillary plant removal & containment, Asbestos and conventional hazard clearance, ventilation and containment tents, redundant plant and pipework de-planting, active drains and pond clean-out, and decontamination of accessible surfaces. Milestone: ancillary buildings radiologically cleared.
- Reactor & primary circuit dismantling, Remote handling and cutting trials, dose budget allocated per work area, primary circuit segmentation and size reduction, reactor internals removal under shielding, dose uptake review, and bioshield removal. Milestone: reactor building emptied.
- Waste packaging, consignment & disposal, Segregation, assay and characterisation records, packaging into shielded containers, consignment to the disposal facility within its acceptance criteria, interim store loading and monitoring, and free-release clearance for material that can leave. Milestone: all active waste consigned or stored.
- Demolition, remediation & delicensing, Final radiological survey of structures, conventional demolition of cleared buildings, land quality assessment and soil remediation, the end-state survey and records package, and the regulator delicensing decision. Milestone: site delicensed.
Who uses this template
Decommissioning project managers, radiation protection advisers, and waste engineers on nuclear licensed sites use this for programmes that span years. It sequences site characterisation, waste routing and acceptance criteria, dose-budgeted dismantling, packaging, and final delicensing, keeping regulatory hold points and ALARP constraints visible across a long, safety-critical schedule.
How to customize it
- Put the waste acceptance criteria and consignment booking bars in before you sequence any dismantling. If they finish later than your cutting starts, the schedule is wrong regardless of how good the dismantling plan looks.
- Give characterisation a generous, early bar. Every downstream estimate, volumes, packaging, dose, cost, is derived from it, and a thin characterisation is the single most reliable predictor of a decommissioning overrun.
- Model dose budget as a constraint on duration, not as a safety note. If an area allows only a certain collective dose per campaign, the work takes as long as it takes and more people do not help.
- Add a regulatory permission milestone in front of each physical phase. Decommissioning is permissioned in stages, and treating consent as a single up-front event misrepresents the real gates.
- Split interim storage from disposal. Material going into an on-site store is not the same as material leaving the site, and only one of those two actually reduces the liability.
- Keep a free-release and recycling bar. A significant fraction of the mass is not active, and clearing it properly reduces both cost and the pressure on the disposal route.
Scheduling tips
- Characterise before you plan, not while you dismantle. A schedule built on assumed inventory is a schedule that will be rebaselined the first time a survey comes back higher than expected.
- Book disposal capacity like a long-lead procurement. Facilities have finite annual volumes and their own queues; a booked consignment slot is an asset and an unbooked one is a stop-work risk.
- Design the cut for the container. Size reduction should be driven by what the package and the acceptance criteria allow, not by what is convenient at the cutting face, recutting active steel is expensive and dose-heavy.
- Track collective dose weekly against the budget. Dose uptake running ahead of plan is an early warning that the method is wrong, and it shows up long before the schedule slips.
- Do not treat asbestos and conventional hazards as minor. On many older plants the non-radiological hazards drive more of the early programme than the radiological ones, and they block access to everything behind them.
- Build the records package as you go. Delicensing depends on evidence that the end state has been reached, and reconstructing survey and consignment records at the end is slower than keeping them current.
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Frequently asked questions
How long does nuclear decommissioning take?
The template spans roughly 1,200 days for a single-plant deferred-dismantling programme, but real programmes range from a few years to several decades depending on the strategy, the waste routes available and whether a safestore period is used.
Why does waste disposal control the schedule?
Because dismantled material has to be characterised, packaged and consigned to a facility that will accept it. If the route is unavailable or the acceptance criteria are unmet, the material stays on site, storage fills, and cutting has to stop.
What is an ALARP dose budget and how does it affect the plan?
It is the limit on radiation exposure that work in an area is planned against. It constrains how many person-hours can be spent there, so tasks in high-dose areas have durations set by dose rather than by available labour.
Why does characterisation come before everything else?
Volumes, dose rates, packaging types, disposal categories and costs all derive from it. Planning dismantling without a characterisation baseline means every estimate downstream is a guess that will be corrected in the field.
Is regulatory permission a single approval?
No. Decommissioning is permissioned in stages, with a safety case and permit variation for each major phase. The template shows permission milestones in front of physical phases rather than one consent at the start.
Is the nuclear decommissioning template free?
Yes. Free Excel, PowerPoint and CSV downloads, and free online editing with no account and no watermark.