SPECIAL REPORT | DALTON INSTITUTE
Dalton: Winning collaboration
The Dalton Nuclear Institute is a longstanding UK partnership between industry and academia focussed on decommissioning. Its director Francis Livens talks to NEI about why it works
IN OCTOBER 2023, A LONGSTANDING partnership between the University of Manchester and the UK’s nuclear decommissioning sector was named as one of the winners of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Bhattacharyya Award. Funded by the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the annual Bhattacharyya Award celebrates collaboration between academia and industry and is awarded to a UK university or college that has demonstrated a sustained, strategic industrial partnership in any academic discipline that has benefitted society and is deserving of national recognition. The University of Manchester won for providing expertise
for quicker, safer nuclear decommissioning. The UK has accumulated a large, complex nuclear legacy and since 2002 the nuclear academic community at The University of Manchester has coordinated skilled people, impactful research and support for government policy development, latterly as the Dalton Nuclear Institute. Professor Francis Livens, Director of the Dalton Nuclear
Institute, has been with the group from its birth. Talking to NEI he said: “We are extremely proud of this collaboration – we have built these relationships over more than two decades, and they have involved several hundred researchers across multiple disciplines.”
Discussing the award and the Dalton Nuclear
Institute, Livens looked back 20 years to the birth of the collaboration. At the time he had 10 years behind him as an academic and “From a personal perspective I have always been interested in doing research that related to the real world”. His appointment at the time had been sponsored by the UK’s fuel cycle and nuclear waste company, then known as BNFL. He says, “They provided some guidance and some funding, and some contacts with interesting people in their own organisation” which helped Livens start to build a research group. Crucially, he says, “I learned so much about the world of nuclear that I never knew.” Through BNFL “I was introduced to bits of the industry that I had never heard of and thought they were very interesting” as well as to colleagues in academia. “You realise you have areas of common interest and that sparks new ideas. What you learn from that is networking, contacts and ideas. [I met] an awful lot of people who were really generous with their time and their ideas.”
The Dalton Nuclear Institute How did that informal network of like-minded people become a recognised group? Initially, BNFL made a £2m ($2.6m) investment into a Centre for Radiochemistry
Above: The Dalton Nuclear Institute is a longstanding UK partnership between industry and academia focussed on decommissioning
46 | February 2024 |
www.neimagazine.com
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