Accelerated Performance for Large Scale Joint Venture Project Team
International engineering and construction group Costain are one of the UK’s leading engineering solutions providers, delivering integrated consulting, project delivery and operations and maintenance services to major blue-chip customers in targeted market sectors.
The Evaporator D project at the Sellafield site in west Cumbria is the biggest nuclear project currently under way in the UK, and is being undertaken by Costain working as the main contractor and partnering with Interserve to manufacture modules off site.
Costain is responsible for the design and engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning of evaporator before it becomes active, and they employed an innovative modular build strategy often used in the hydrocarbons and chemicals industry sector but this is the first time that the nuclear sector has chosen to pre-fabricate modules of this size and scale off-site.
The eleven large, prefabricated modules required to create the evaporator plant were constructed at Interserve’s dedicated facility in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire.
The modules vary considerably in size: the smallest are 10m x 7.5m x 10m and weigh over 100 tonnes. The largest is 27m x 12.5m x 7.5m and weighs over 500 tonnes and include more than 21 kilometres of pipework and over 10,000 specialist welds.
Opportunities were identified to maintain and enhance effective team working in this complex, challenging and large-scale inter-company project.
“This extent of modularisation was novel for the client and the nuclear regulatory authorities; it was vital to work collaboratively to make this concept work effectively. The solution was to form an alliance partnership between Costain, Sellafield and other major strategic supply chain partners. One of the many success examples of this integrated team approach is the submission and approval of the Pre-Construction Safety Case in just 99 days.”
https://www.costain.com/solutions/case-studies/evaporator-d-sellafield/