Decontamination and Decommissioning

The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.

NorthStar Group Services has announced that it has closed on an agreement to acquire ownership of the Vallecitos Nuclear Center from GE Vernova and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy for NorthStar's nuclear decontamination, decommissioning, and environmental site restoration.

A virtual meeting between representatives of the West Valley Demonstration Project (WVDP) in New York and the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) in Tennessee was held recently to share lessons learned from the ongoing demolition of West Valley’s main plant process building.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has updated its guidance for nuclear power plant owners and operators in estimating the cost of decommissioning their reactors. Licensed power reactor operators are required under NRC regulations to annually adjust the estimated costs (in current year U.S. dollars) of decommissioning their plants to ensure that adequate funds are available when needed.

Work has started at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to deactivate, decommission, and remove the Ion Beam Facility, which played a role in research and experiments that helped develop the nation’s nuclear arsenal during the 1950s and 1960s.

Work to prepare Hanford’s Reduction Oxide Plant (REDOX) for decontamination and demolition has been put on hold as the Department of Energy shifts focus to higher-priority work at the nuclear site in Washington state.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will soon, for the first time, begin using drones to internally inspect radioactive liquid waste tanks at the department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Inspections were previously done using magnetic wall-crawling robots.

Constellation Energy has announced that it will seek to restart Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania as part of an agreement with Microsoft to power that company’s data centers. Given the growing interest by tech companies in using clean, reliable nuclear power to meet their growing energy demands, the September 20 announcement to reopen TMI-1, which was shut down and defueled in 2019, was not a huge surprise.

The pursuit of returning two of the country’s retired nuclear plants into service is not only unusual—it is unprecedented and promises to make history.

That’s according to a piece coauthored by former assistant secretary for nuclear energy Katy Huff in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists regarding plans from Holtec and Constellation to restart Michigan’s Palisades plant and Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island Unit 1, respectively.

Chantilly, Va.-based Amentum has been awarded a 7-year contract estimated to be worth €5.5 million (about $6 million) to consult on the dismantling of steam drum separators in Units 1 and 2 of Lithuania’s Ignalina nuclear power plant. Once the country’s largest generator of electricity, Ignalina was permanently shut down in 2009 and the plant’s two RBMK-1500 reactors are expected to be fully decommissioned by 2038.

The U.S. Navy’s Surface Ship Support Barge, converted in the 1960s from a WWII T2 tanker to a support barge to accept spent nuclear fuel during the refueling of nuclear aircraft carriers, was dismantled and disposed of by the nuclear decommissioning company APTIM as a first-of-its-kind vessel dismantlement project for the Navy. The project was executed under contract with Naval Sea Systems Command; however, regulatory oversight was accomplished through an interagency framework agreement between the U.S. Navy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Despite progress made over the past years, the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has not seen an adequate return on investment in cleaning up the Sellafield nuclear site on England’s Cumbria coast, according to a new report by the U.K.’s National Audit Office, which scrutinizes government spending.

The Department of Energy is proposing to fully decommission the Submarine 5th Generation General Electric (S5G) prototype at the Naval Reactors Facility on the Idaho National Laboratory site. Along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Idaho, the DOE has initiated a 30-day public comment period (ending November 14) on the planned end state for the facility and its defueled reactor vessel.

With the recent mobilization at the site of the former SM-1A nuclear power plant at Fort Greely, Alaska, the Radiological Health Physics Regional Center of Expertise, located at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Baltimore District, began its work toward the decommissioning and dismantlement of its third nuclear power plant, this time located just 175 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Robotics is fast becoming a go-to for nuclear decommissioning advances, and several organizations working in West Cumbria, England, the hub of the United Kingdom’s energy sector, have formed a partnership to share insight and work together to address common challenges and opportunities. Cumbria Robotics Cluster is an ambitious initiative powered by the Industrial Solutions Hub (iSH) to harness and expand the region’s renowned capabilities in cutting-edge engineering and problem solving.

In October 2012, Dominion Energy announced it was closing the Kewaunee nuclear power plant, a two-loop 574-MWe pressurized water reactor located about 27 miles southeast of Green Bay, Wis., on the western shore of Lake Michigan. At the time, Dominion said the plant was running well, but that low wholesale electricity prices in the region made it uneconomical to continue operation of the single-unit merchant power plant.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is soliciting public comment on the agency’s guidance for addressing discrete radioactive particle (DRP) contamination resulting from the decontamination and decommissioning of nuclear facilities. According to the NRC, the draft guidance is intended to avoid any inconsistencies in how the agency approaches DRP contamination.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the government agency charged with cleaning up the United Kingdom’s nuclear sites, has awarded three contracts totaling £30 million (about $39 million) for research into new decommissioning techniques.

Sogin (Società Gestione Impianti Nucleari), the state-owned company responsible for the decommissioning of Italy’s nuclear plants and the management of radioactive waste, announced on July 30 that it has completed the first phase of dismantling Garigliano nuclear power plant’s reactor vessel with the removal of contaminated metal components from the deflector.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $630 million to Louisiana-based Aptim Federal Services for deactivation and decommissioning work at two U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program sites in New York.