Demolition run backwards through a paperwork machine, measured in decades.
Decommissioning is demolition with the order reversed and the evidence multiplied. Nothing is touched until it has been surveyed, characterised and recorded, because the classification of what comes out decides where it can go - and where it can go decides whether the work can proceed at all.
The process map - 5 guides
Each one is a full guide: overview, variants, numbered steps, plant, testing, safety and defects.
Characterisation & Planning
Establishing and recording exactly what is on the site before anything is touched - the structures, their condition, the materials they are made of, what runs beneath them and where every stream of arisings will eventually be allowed to go.
Open process
Asset Care & Preparation
Getting a redundant plant into a state it can be left in or worked on - stripping out non-active plant, removing the conventional hazards, refurbishing the fabric for a long second life, installing the services the dismantling will need, and shrinking the site to what has to be kept.
Open process
Dismantling & Size Reduction
Taking the plant apart piece by piece and cutting the pieces down to the size the container will take - remote and mechanical techniques that keep people away from the work face, inside containment enclosures with their own ventilation, on a structure that was never designed to come apart.
Open process
Waste Packaging & Transfer
The logistics operation that actually governs the programme - segregating at the work face, monitoring and releasing the clean fraction, packaging the rest to the criteria the disposal route sets, recording every package and moving it to store or off site.
Open process
Site Remediation & Delicensing
The last phase - conventional demolition of the structures that remain, breaking out slabs, foundations, drains and tunnels, remediating and reprofiling the ground, then assembling the evidence that lets the land be released and turned back into ordinary ground.
Open processShared methods used in this sector
These guides are owned by other sectors - the canonical page lives there - but the method is the same here. Cards open the guide at its home sector.
Site Clearance & Demolition
Removing vegetation, structures and contaminants - and turning arisings into resource.
Open processCanonical guide: Residential & Housing
Ground Remediation
Taking contaminated brownfield ground from desk study to verified clean: investigation, strategy, dig-and-dump or in-situ treatment, and the validation file that lets houses or industry sit where the gasworks stood.
Open processCanonical guide: Land Development & Earthworks
Nuclear Decommissioning in depth
About Nuclear Decommissioning
The engineering itself is recognisable: strip out the plant that can be removed conventionally, then dismantle the rest using remote and mechanical techniques that keep people away from the work face, inside enclosures that contain it. Size reduction turns large structures into packages a disposal route will accept. Long quiescent periods between phases are a deliberate strategy, not neglect.
These guides cover the civil, structural and demolition engineering only. Radiological protection, security and the handling of nuclear material are controlled by the site licensee and the regulator and sit outside the scope of anything published here. The end state, decades later, is ordinary land.