Conceptual Design

Our functional specification and conceptual design services focus on safety-integrated design basis development, which is required by the UK nuclear regulator. We support organisations with Design Authority responsibility and specialise in options studies for selecting appropriate disposal systems for a broad range of host rocks and classifications of radioactive waste. We have excellent systems and process engineering capability that incorporates both the derivation and management of requirements. We manage complex requirements databases and documents, both at a stakeholder and system level, and are able to produce high quality requirement sets with accompanying satisfaction arguments showing rich traceability.

The MCM team has considerable experience accumulated over 3 decades in developing disposal concepts in various host rocks and for various types. A major focus has been on the the development of reference repository concepts/designs used in the UK, Switzerland and Japan. This complements our experience in supporting clients with the establishment and development of requirements management systems.

Our conceptual design services include:

• Review / support of all major national programmes (in particular UK, S, SF, USA, ROK, RSA, CAN, D, B)
• Planning and management of experiments testing disposal concepts at large - full-scale in underground laboratories
• Use of knowledge engineering tools to develop optimised HLW / TRU designs for a volunteering approach to siting
• Development of optimised solutions for wastes arising from Fukushima Dai-ichi (FDI)

Our requirements management services include:

• Determining and accurately capturing requirements for complex project (including elicitation of requirements from historic documentation, e.g. safety cases and design specifications)
• Providing traceability of decisions, auditable change control, and solutions tied directly to requirements
• Using a  systems engineering approach to develop system specifications through the definition of system requirements against which project design activities can be carried out