DALTON INSTITUTE | SPECIAL REPORT
Above: Dalton is helping the UK manage its plutonium stockpile
Research. “That took us from being a group centred around one individual academic to a group of four academics”. It was a “big step up in volume, in investment” and it allowed for academics with diverse activities. The four worked as a group, with some closely associated with industry and others less so. But that meant “We had different touchpoints with the sector and that worked well.” Livens says the change from one person to having four with complementary interests multiplied the opportunities because each academic has their own network. The group also provides important early feedback: Livens
recalls a proposal he was working on last year: “by the time I had floated it round my colleagues it was very different”. There was an element of chance in the group’s eventual
focus on decommissioning. “At the time BNFL saw itself as a single organisation that was going to sell nuclear fuel cycle services to the world. So there was lots of encouragement from them for us to be involved in the chemistry of nuclear fuel reprocessing,” says Livens. But after a couple of years the UK government produced a policy paper on ‘Managing the Nuclear Legacy’, which resulted in “the complete turnaround of the nuclear sector, breaking up of BNFL and a much stronger focus on environment, waste and decommissioning.” The group saw a change in priorities and the environmental and remediation work that had come second to reprocessing moved to the top of the agenda. Livens says the group’s mix of interests allowed it to
change tack: “There is something about having a broad portfolio which means there is work that is immediately interesting and relevant, but also long term work and work that is undertaken just because it is interesting”. He adds, “Over a period of a couple of decades things emerge and things disappear again. If a university can’t retain that portfolio and ramp things up and down as required, then who can?”
Expanding the network As the initial collaboration grew, Livens says, “other departments started to build capability. For example, what is now our Earth and Environmental Sciences Department made an appointment in environmental radioactivity, because there was enough going on between the departments that they felt there was more they could develop.” That scientist, Katherine Morris, is now Professor of Environmental Radiochemistry, heading a team of collaborators and several labs. Livens says “Similarly our chemical engineering dept made an appointment. That’s the model we followed and there are a number of nuclear foci
around the university now, like the materials performance centre. You start to have a network of networks.” The expanding networks bring in people from other disciplines, “People who have been working on, say, the oil and gas side in geology, lots of what they do is relevant in things like geological disposal of radioactive waste”. They make the connection with nuclear, perhaps for the first time, while in return the group’s chemists can work with experts in geology. The network became the Dalton Nuclear Institute in 2005, when what was formerly the Victoria University merged with UMIST and created The University of Manchester. “As part of that process they created a small number of interdisciplinary institutes to cut across the disciplines, and one was the Dalton Nuclear Institute. That recognised the reality – nuclear had a lot of horizontal connections – but it gave that community an identity”. What is more, the Dalton Institute had a profile and
some resource. Livens says the profile helps in external engagement – “you can talk to regulators, to government, to industry”. It also provides a ‘shop window’ that allows interested outsiders to bypass the university’s “massively complicated” structure, “If they want, for example, to find someone who knows about stress corrosion cracking”. Dalton has also been important because it allowed for
recognition that nuclear is not just science and technology. The Institute has two complementary activities. The first is social science: “Going back five years we set up ‘the BEAM’ a collaboration between interested science and technology people and some of our social scientists …you are getting a very different perspective and a different challenge”. In the real world there are issues like the ‘social license to operate’, so decommissioning “is a long way from just being a science and engineering problem. That perspective has been really valuable.” The second is to find more communication pathways, via the Dalton Nuclear Policy Group, which has so far published four ‘position papers’. “Those are starting to have some traction because we are relatively objective as a university, no-one is paying us to do it, we have access to a lot of intellectual horse power, and one thing we can do its produce really good quality output. It’s a more useful means of putting material out there than a journal paper.”
Return on investment Asked about why the Institute has been successful, Livens says time to grow is vital, “because ultimately this is about building understanding and building relationships”.
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