Archive for category: General News

Reds10 begins construction of innovative and highly sustainable Army accommodation at Upavon

200 new bedspaces to be delivered for Army personnel using advanced modular construction techniques

Reds10, pioneer in industrialised delivery, has begun the construction of over 200 new bedspaces for Army personnel in Upavon, under a major investment programme that is improving standards of living accommodation across the defence forces estate.

A groundbreaking event was held at Trenchard Lines last month to mark the start of construction on the four new Single Living Accommodation (SLA) blocks. The project is being delivered by Reds10 on behalf of the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO), through the Army’s SLA Programme, which is investing £1.4bn over 10 years to support the modernisation of the Army estate and provide c.8,500 new bedspaces.

In the first phase of the Upavon project, a total of five old accommodation blocks on site will be demolished and replaced by 200 modern en-suite bedspaces in four separate buildings. Concurrently an older building onsite will be refurbished to provide 21 ensuite bedrooms, improving on the previous interior layout of 19 bedrooms with shared ablutions.

The new SLA blocks include kitchens and communal space with a range of features to enhance the lived experience, such as fitted furniture, equipment storage and floor to ceiling windows. The building design incorporates feedback from soldiers to ensure it meets their current and future needs.

The new accommodation has been designed to achieve the very highest levels of energy efficiency and will be delivered using Modern Methods of Construction (MMC). Utilising Reds10’s wholly owned MMC factory facility in East Yorkshire, a minimum of 85% of the new accommodation will be manufactured in Driffield before being transported to Upavon to be assembled on site, maximising productivity, quality and control and minimising disruption.

To support the Army’s net zero ambitions and future resilience of the estate, the SLA blocks include sustainable features such as solar panels, individual thermostats with SMART monitors and a Building Energy Management System to support efficiencies in running and maintenance. An all-electric design comprising air source heat pumps, heat recovery ventilation and infra-red panels will also contribute to exceptionally low energy consumption further off-set by renewable technology.

In addition to the SLA blocks, construction on a new Officers’ Mess at Upavon will begin in 2025 to provide a further 69 bedspaces. All the buildings will be handed over in phases to enable the timely move-in of personnel, with the entire project due to complete in Autumn 2026.

Matt Bennion, CEO for Reds10, said:

“This latest groundbreaking event showcases the progress we are making in the Single Living Accommodation project alongside the Army and DIO. Building on our other successful projects at Imjin Barracks and RMA Sandhurst, these state-of-the-art buildings will deliver sustainable, high-quality and cost-effective new accommodation for our armed forces personnel, demonstrating the benefits of MMC for both occupants and the defence estate.”

Warren Webster, Defence Infrastructure Organisation, Major Programmes and Projects (Army) Director said:

“A momentous occasion for Trenchard Lines. Major infrastructure upgrade is overdue on this historically important site, so we are delighted to have reached this point.

“The Army’s programme of Single Living Accommodation upgrade was initiated in 2021 and Trenchard is the ninth project to start construction. A fantastic collaboration with our Army colleagues to achieve real progress for the benefit of our service personnel.”

Brigadier Pete Quaite OBE, Head of Army Infra Plans, said:

“I am delighted to see the start of construction works at Upavon to deliver modern, fit-for-purpose, high quality accommodation for our people.

 “The significant investment underway at this site demonstrates our ongoing commitment to delivering the facilities that soldiers need and deserve, and to enhancing the environments in which they live, work and train.”

New research has revealed that 20% of building service engineers are unfamiliar with the UK Building Regulations’ Approved Document O, which addresses overheating in buildings – and almost half (46%) claim to understand the theory behind it but are unsure how to put it into practice.

The new study, commissioned by Zehnder Group UK in collaboration with CIBSE Journal, found that while a third (34%) of respondents claimed to know Part O ‘inside out’, the majority had a limited understanding – with 19% admitting they simply don’t understand it at all.

These concerning findings form part of a new report that surveyed architects, consultants, developers and contractors to get a better view of the understanding across the building industry when it comes to overheating.

Overheating is a real problem in residential buildings. When properties exceed a temperature threshold of 26°C for extended periods it can seriously affect occupant thermal comfort, health and wellbeing as well as productivity.

The research found that despite this evidence of overheating risks, the topic ranked relatively low among the respondents’ list of priorities, with design, quality, building regulations and energy efficiency coming out on top in new building projects – whereas modelling against the risk of overheating ranked eighth.

When asked what kept them up at night when planning a new building project, the top three concerns were design, cost and quality, with overheating being cited as sixth.

Jason Bennett at Zehnder Group UK said: “The issue of overheating isn’t going to go away; it’s only going to get worse as climate change has more of an impact, heatwaves become more frequent and we continue to create highly energy efficient homes that are effectively turning into ‘hot boxes’.”

The survey findings underscore the need for a holistic and joined-up approach to buildings that incorporate robust strategies to mitigate overheating risks. This includes promoting better indoor air quality alongside cooling.

CLICK TO Read the full report here:

Groundwater flooding – the emergence of groundwater into buildings and infrastructure due to unusually high water levels – is not currently listed on the UK’s National Risk Register. This is despite its long-documented ability to drive extreme flooding events; with interactions that often trigger the worst river and flash flooding disasters, including, for example, last winter. The number of UK homes within areas at direct risk from groundwater flooding is 770,000 and damage from groundwater accounts for 13% of the UK’s average annual financial losses from flooding. What’s more, groundwater also contributes to losses from rivers, surface water and coastal flooding by prolonging the duration of flood events. The result is disproportionate, long-term damage to properties, infrastructure and the environment.

“Groundwater flooding is a serious risk because it often causes far more damage than other flooding and can be devastating for those who are flooded,” says GeoSmart director Mark Fermor. “It also leads to significant economic consequences for communities affected.”

Fermor adds that a “perfect storm” of factors – including the new government’s plans to build 1.5 million new homes – has made the current situation more acute.

“In the winter of 2019-2020, we narrowly avoided a full-scale disaster with groundwater flooding in the UK,” he says. “The impact of climate change, plus recently relaxed rules designed to speed up construction across the UK, means there’s worse to come.

“First off, we’re heading into autumn and winter, when the risk of groundwater flooding is higher, without enough focus on this. Secondly, the new Labour government has set out a target of 1.5 million new homes over the next parliament; while lacking a full baseline risk assessment for risk of flooding to property and infrastructure. And thirdly, climate change plays into both these risks, with increased temperatures and changing rainfall impacting the frequency and severity of groundwater driven flooding.”

The dangers posed by climate change mean 1.9 million people in the UK currently live in areas at significant risk of flooding; and this number could double by the 2050s. The Environment Agency also predicts that “bigger, more frequent floods are expected over the 21st century, particularly during winter.”

In the light of the increased risk, GeoSmart is urging the government to develop a robust management strategy that recognises groundwater flooding as one of the UK’s foremost natural dangers based on a more holistic flood risk assessment.

“Data from our national FloodSmart Analytics platform shows that groundwater leads to more annual losses than coastal flooding, and it’s also a central primer for other kinds of flooding events.” says Fermor. “Because groundwater flooding has been misread as a tiny part of the UK’s flood problem, we risk sleepwalking into disaster. It’s a bit like the Covid outbreak, where the government was found to have failed UK citizens through a lack of preparation.”

Fermor also cautions that obstacles to effective flood risk management created by the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 (FWMA) and consequential errors and omissions have resulted in the central role of groundwater being overlooked.

He adds: “That’s why we’re calling on Steve Reed, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to hold an urgent review as the basis for a more comprehensive flood risk management strategy that includes listing groundwater flooding on the National Risk Register.”

“Fiendish”, “technically tough”, “difficult”, “complicated”. Those were just a few of the choice words used at an event last week in Oxfordshire, UK, to describe ambitious plans to build a prototype fusion power plant. Held at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) Culham campus, the half-day meeting on 5 September saw engineers and physicists discuss the challenges that lie ahead as well the opportunities that this fusion “moonshot” represents.

The prototype fusion plant in question is known as the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP), which was first announced by the UK government in 2019 when it unveiled a £220m package of funding for the project. STEP will be based on “spherical” tokamak technology currently being pioneered at the UK’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE). In 2022 a site for STEP was chosen at the former coal-fired power station at West Burton in Nottinghamshire. Operations are expected to begin in the 2040s with STEP aiming to prove the commercial viability of fusion by demonstrating net energy, fuel self-sufficiency and a viable route to plant maintenance.

A spherical tokamak is more compact than a traditional tokamak, such as the ITER experimental fusion reactor currently being built in Cadarache, France, which has been hit with cost hikes and delays in recent years. The compact nature of the spherical tokamak, which was first pioneered in the UK in the 1980s, is expected to minimize costs, maximise energy output and possibly make it easier to maintain when scaled up to a fully-fledged fusion power plant.

The current leading spherical tokamaks worldwide are the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST-U) at the CCFE and the National Spherical Torus Experiment at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in the US, which is nearing the completion of an upgrade. Despite much progress, however, those tokamaks are yet to demonstrate fusion conditions through the use of the hydrogen isotope tritium in the fuel, which is necessary to achieve a “burning” plasma. This goal has, though, already been achieved in traditional tokamaks such as the Joint European Torus, which turned off in 2023.

“STEP is a big extrapolation from today’s machines,” admitted STEP chief engineer Chris Waldon at the event. “It is complex and complicated but we are now beginning to converge on a single design [for STEP]”.

A fusion ‘moonshot’

The meeting at Culham was held to mark the publication of 15 papers on the technical progress made on STEP over the past four years. They cover STEP’s plasma, its maintenance, magnets, tritium-breeding programme as well as pathways for fuel self-sufficiency (Philosophical Transactions A 382 20230416). Officials were keen to stress, however, that the papers were a snapshot of progress to date and that since then some aspects of the design have progressed.

One issue that crept up during the talks was the challenge of extrapolating every element of tokamak technology to STEP – a feat described by one panellist as being “so far off our graphs”. While theory and modelling have come a long way in the last decade, even the best models will not be a substitute for the real thing. “Until we do STEP we won’t know everything,” says physicist Steve Cowley, director of the PPPL. Those challenges involve managing potential instabilities and disruptions in the plasma – which at worst could obliterate the wall of a reactor – as well as operating high-temperature superconducting magnets to confine the plasma that have yet to be tested under the intensity of fusion conditions.

We need to produce a project that will deliver energy someone will buy

Ian Chapman

Another significant challenge is self-breeding tritium via neutron capture in lithium, which would be done in a roughly one-metre thick “blanket” surrounding the reactor. This is far from straightforward and the STEP team are still researching what technology might prevail – whether to use a solid pebble-bed or liquid lithium. While liquid lithium is good at producing tritium, for example, extracting the isotope to put back into the reactor is complex.

Howard Wilson, fusion pilot plant R&D lead at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, was keen to stress that STEP will not be a commercial power plant. Instead, its job rather is to demonstrate “a pathway towards commercialisation”. That is likely to come in several stages, the first being to generate 1 GW of power, which would result in 100 MW to the “grid” (the other 900 MW needed to power the systems). The second stage will be to test if that power production is sustainable via the self-breeding of tritium back into the reactor, what is known as a “closed fuel cycle”.

Ian Chapman, chief executive of the UKAEA, outlined what he called the “fiendish” challenges that lie ahead for fusion, even if STEP demonstrates that it is possible to deliver energy to the grid in a sustainable way. “We need to produce a project that will deliver energy someone will buy,” he said. That will be achieved in part via STEP’s third objective, which is to get a better understanding of the maintenance requirements of a fusion power plant and the impact that would have on reactor downtime. “We fail if there is not cost-effective solution,” added STEP engineering director Debbie Kempton.

STEP officials are now selecting industry partners — in engineering and construction — to work alongside the UKAEA to work on the design. Indeed, STEP is as much about physically building a plant as it is creating a whole fusion industry. A breathless two-minute pre-event promotional film — that loftily compared the development of fusion to the advent of the steam train and vaccines — was certainly given a much needed reality check.

Source: Physics World