A joint-venture decommissioning team will soon prepare to dismantle the long-dormant SM-1 reactor at the Ft. Belvoir Army base in Virginia after a months-long contract protest, the Army Corps of Engineers said this week.
After APTIM AECOM Decommissioning, LLC (A2D) secured the roughly $68 million federal contract to decommission SM-1 in August 2020, a protest filed by Westinghouse Government Services, LLC (WGS) in September of that year put work on hold for several months, a spokesperson for the Corps of Engineers told RadWaste Monitor via email Tuesday.
Although A2D’s contract was upheld, work on the SM-1 contract didn’t resume until February, the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for WGS declined to comment.
A2D is a joint venture led by Aptim with Amentum. AECOM spun off its government contracting business as Amentum in 2020.
The contract to dismantle SM-1, located in Fairfax County, Va., includes all aspects of decommissioning such as removal of reactor components, materials transportation and site remediation.
Meanwhile, the decommissioning process at Fort Belvoir is beginning to spin up. According to a project update dated Oct. 13, the Corps of Engineers plans to “mobilize limited site crew” in early November to start prepping SM-1 reactor in Fairfax County for dismantlement. A2D will start asbestos removal and site environmental monitoring next month, the update said.
The remainder of this year and the majority of 2022 will be devoted to “additional site preparation,” the corps said. Decommissioning should actually begin some time next year. SM-1 should be fully decommissioned by 2025 or so, the corps estimates.
SM-1, located just about 17 miles from Washington, was the Army’s first nuclear reactor and the first to be connected to the commercial power grid for a sustained period. The site’s fuel inventory was removed in 1974 and waste from the reactor’s three cores was shipped to the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) and the Savannah River Site (SRS).
SM-1 shut down in 1973, just 16 years after it first achieved criticality in 1957.
