Jeremy L. Dillon
WC Monitor
6/5/2015
Kurion and AREVA announced this week a joint partnership to provide decommissioning and remediation services for the Department of Energy’s cleanup complex. The companies said that the alliance’s initial emphasis centers on cleanup and closure work at the Hanford site in Washington state, but they indicated that it could expand to decommissioning of other nuclear facilities and cleanup projects as well. “Through this partnership, we will strengthen our offering in the growing U.S. decommissioning market,” AREVA CEO Gary Mignogna said in a statement. “The unique combination of our companies’ expertise, knowledge and technology will create innovative and economical solutions to best meet our customers’ needs.”
Kurion and AREVA are both looking to expand their role and make a larger impact within the DOE cleanup marketplace. According to each company, the combination of the their experiences and technology at Hanford could provide opportunities for contract work that remained closed to the individual companies. “AREVA has a solid foothold at Hanford,” Kurion Executive Vice President of North American Operations David Brockman told WC Monitor this week. “They are on two teams, and they’ve managed large projects at the site. They have some unique engineering skills that we may not have. But for Hanford, that’s the big deal, is the additional credibility and platform to deploy technologies.”
AREVA Federal Services President and CEO Tara Neider echoed those thoughts. “One of the things that we are focusing on is increasing our critical mass,” she said. “We have a pretty strong organization at the Hanford location as well. But by combining, we can do many more things. So we can basically apply technologies from both our companies. I believe AREVA has very strong program in terms of conducting projects, and with Kurion, the additional people that we get really makes both companies stronger, particularly at the Hanford location.”
Focus on Existing Work, Subcontracts
The two companies are currently working with each other on the $19 million subcontract for work at the 324 Building in the Hanford 300 Area that deals with remediation of cesium and strontium contaminated soil. AREVA originally won that contract with Vista Engineering, which was acquired by Kurion in early 2014. The other area of possible collaboration is treatment of the tank waste at Hanford. AREVA is part of the team responsible for the tank waste contract, and with Kurion’s ion exchange technology, the two companies see a path for shared work with the tank waste, they said. “They have some major contracts at Hanford, and we do not,” Brockman said. “We have some Basic Ordering Agreements out there for engineering, so the goal is to provide us access to those significant contracts and to pool our resources to bring some real solutions to some of the technical challenges out there.”
The initial focus of the collaboration, the two said, will center on existing work and pursuing subcontracts at the site, but the two companies plan to aim at the larger contracts DOE has scheduled for the coming years. “We are looking at any contracts that basically support waste management and decommissioning activates,” Neider said. “We are clearly focused on the bigger contracts coming the next few years. [The partnership] will probably extend past Hanford, but for right now, Hanford is clearly the site that has the most funding, the most issues that need to be resolved, and the biggest market.”
