Company Has 15 Major Reactor Decommissioning Projects Under Contract Around the World
Waste Management Symposia, Phoenix, March 8, 2022 –Westinghouse Electric Company announced today at the Waste Management Symposia that recent success in the market has propelled Westinghouse to a clear global leadership position in reactor dismantling with active contracts at 15 reactors around the world currently.
“Given our longstanding history of designing, building and optimizing nuclear plants, we have an unparalleled level of sophistication about our methods and technical approach that delivers certainty to our customers on the most complex decommissioning scopes,” said Sam Shakir, President, Environmental Services at Westinghouse. “In our work, we aim to reimagine the sites as safe, thriving, and sustainable and ensure the decommissioning projects are completed efficiently and in a manner that returns them to green fields.”
Today, Westinghouse has major decommissioning contracts at Gundremmingen B & C, Unterweser, Grafenrheinfeld, Grohnde Brokdorf, Brunsbüttel, and Isar 1 & 2 (Germany); Bohunice V1 units 1 & 2 (Slovakia); Fort Calhoun (USA); Chooz A (France); and Ågesta and Ringhals 1 & 2 (Sweden).
Westinghouse offers specialized decommissioning services focused on the most complex of scopes to help customers reduce program risks and cost. Our deep bench of specialized decommissioning resources operating from global centers of excellence including: Västerås (Sweden), Mannheim (Germany), Madrid (Spain), Marseille (France), Trnava (Slovakia), Nivelles (Belgium), Monfalcone (Italy), Springfields and Sellafield (UK), Cranberry and Richland (USA). This unique geographical presence allows Westinghouse to leverage its global expertise to serve our customers locally.
Westinghouse also recently completed reactor dismantling projects at Jose Cabrera in 2013 and 2015 (Spain), Barsebäck 2 in 2017 and Barsebäck 1 in 2018 (Sweden), Neckarwestheim I in 2019 (Germany) and Philippsburg 1 in 2020 (Germany).
Additionally, Westinghouse is the only company in the world that has decommissioned a graphite-moderated reactor when it successfully dismantled the Fort St. Vrain gas-cooled reactor in Colorado, USA. This first-of-its-kind complex project was executed with precision using a variety of Westinghouse-developed remote handling technologies and methods. The extensive know-how and lessons learned is being used currently to plan the decommissioning of the Vandellòs 1 graphite moderated reactor in Spain. Here, Westinghouse has supported the plant transition from shutdown to safe store, the retrieval of wastes from its graphite silos, and the development of detailed decommissioning planning to include characterization, activation analyses, optimum dismantling strategy, and conceptual design.
Supporting our global decommissioning capabilities are Westinghouse sites capable of providing decontamination services to reduce the volume of low-level wastes that require permanent disposal and reduce dismantling costs. The company recently completed a full-system chemical decontamination at Ringhals 1 &2 (Sweden) and is currently preforming a similar project at Kozloduy units 1, 2, 3, 4 (Bulgaria). At the Westinghouse site in Springfields (UK), the company is developing extensive nuclear materials management, decontamination, and waste treatment solutions to serve both the UK and European nuclear markets.
Westinghouse’s vision of expanding clean nuclear energy globally compels the company to continue to innovate and to maintain our leadership role in safe and efficient decommissioning of nuclear facilities and management of waste.
“Because we design, build, support the operation and optimize nuclear plants, we know how to decommission all types of reactors. We’ve developed proprietary, ecologically-advanced handling equipment, containers and other technical innovations to manage spent fuel and treat, handle, store and dispose of radioactive waste,” added Shakir. “We also clean, dismantle and remove materials from a site and provide the industry’s most complete range of ancillary services, from project planning, post-operation support and waste optimization, to final site surveys and monitoring and regulatory management.”
