Mark Crawford

Mark Crawford

Consultant

Dr. Mark B. Crawford is a Senior Consultant of Galson Sciences. He has degrees in Geology and Geochemistry from Oxford University (BA) and Leicester University (PhD), and a Diploma in Environmental Impact Assessment. Over the last 15 years he has been involved in consultancy and research work in the area of radioactive waste disposal for clients in Belgium, Finland, France, Japan, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.

Mark is leading our work to develop PAs and ESCs for proposed new LLW disposal facilities at Dounreay. He previously acted as project manager for the development of PAs for LLW management/disposal options appraisal. He led or contributed to a wide range of studies on safety, environmental, technical, socio-economic, and cost evaluations of various options. He advised on site characterisation requirements, and developed a Requirements Management System for development of a radioactive waste management facility.

He made substantial contributions to the development and review of technical input for the US Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) Compliance Certification Application (CCA). He led the development of PASS© (Performance Assessment Support System) V2.0 and PA_TARDIS, relational databases and communications tools to provide easy access to and management of safety assessment information and the underlying supporting data, assumptions and decisions. Other work has included a review of approaches to modelling colloid transport at Yucca Mountain for the Electric Power and Research Institute (EPRI) in the US, a review of scenario development methodologies on behalf of ANDRA in France, and support for the TILA-99 performance assessment study in Finland.

For the Environment Agency, Mark has developed a framework to assist in strategic environmental risk assessment. He has also been responsible for the conduct of a risk assessment of the LLW disposal site near Drigg. This assessment was conducted with the GoldSim code. He reviewed geological and hydrogeological aspects of BNFL’s work, and contributed to an audit of BNFL’s work. For the Environment Agency, he also undertook an evaluation of the impact of new waste processing techniques at Sellafield designed to reduce discharges of Tc-99.

Other work has included the development of geochemical models for organic complexation in natural systems, validation of sorption modelling within an European Commission research initiative, and interpretation of hydrochemical data obtained as part of the UK Nirex Site Characterisation Programme. He has performed reviews of geochemical techniques in relation to palaeo-hydrogeological studies and of the effects of alkaline plume migration from cementitious waste repositories.

Mark was project manager and technical lead for top-level BPEO studies for decommissioning of the Windscale Piles. He has been responsible for a project compiling and interlinking environmental reporting requirements for decommissioning of HPA. This work has been done for British Nuclear Group.