Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
12/12/2014
Kurion announced this week the opening of a United Kingdom office, Kurion Limited, to better support operations in Europe. The new office, which former Chief Operating Officer Phil Ohl will lead as Vice President of European Operations, marks Kurion’s second international office, following the opening of its Japanese headquarters earlier this year. The attraction of Europe’s Cold War legacy and the potential for an increased waste treatment stream in Germany in the coming years drew Kurion’s interest to European expansion. “There is a significant need for nuclear and hazardous waste solutions in Europe to manage waste stemming from the Cold War and the decommissioning of commercial nuclear power plants,” Ohl said in a statement. “I’ve built my career working on a variety of projects for Hanford, one of the world’s largest nuclear waste sites, and I’m excited to offer this experience, along with the Kurion technologies, to support Europe’s waste-management challenges.”
For Kurion, this new office marks the emergence of the company as a global entity, company officials said. “We are now really and truly a global corporation covering all corners of the world,” Ohl told RW Monitor this week. “The sun never sleeps on the Kurion Empire now. One of the reasons I sold my company to Kurion is because it’s a company that is working on matters that matter. It’s an exciting time to be at Kurion.”
Company Looks to Deploy Fukushima and Hanford Technology In Europe
The company believes it can apply the technology it currently uses at Fukushima and Hanford to cleanup projects across Europe, according to Ohl. “It’s remarkable to me how similar the problems in the U.K., France, and Italy are to the problems in the U.S.,” Ohl said. He added, “When we looked at what we’ve done at Fukushima, some of those same things will be available to us in Europe. Water treatment applies more to the weapons D&D, the places that stored fuel and have debris cleanup in ponds and sludge over many, many years. That is one of the things we see at Sellafield. We see the German market as they have made their commitments to decommission their commercial reactor fleet as a big opportunity.”
Specifically, Ohl noted, Kurion is looking for solutions to better address graphite decommissioning at commercial reactors. “One of the things that is going to have to happen with commercial reactors is there will be graphite that will have to be decommissioned, and so that is one of the things Kurion is looking into. We don’t have a graphite solution right now, but that is one of the things we are exploring with our internal research and development money,” Ohl said.
Kurion already has a partnership with the United Kingdom’s National Nuclear Laboratory at Sellafield to deploy and demonstrate its GeoMelt vitrification technology. The system is currently being installed at Sellafield, and according to Ohl, it should begin demonstrations this coming summer. “We expect to be through cold commissioning by the end of March, and hot commissioning this summer,” Ohl said. “There are already people chomping at the bit to come tour it, and see the demonstration and see radioactive glass come out the other end safely.”
While Kurion has succeeded internationally, the company has had some trouble breaking into the DOE market. Kurion does some engineering work at the Hanford site, mainly with the tank farms, but it has not been able to leverage its access, separation, and stabilization to other DOE cleanup sites. “I don’t want to comment too much, but it’s very interesting that we have to go abroad to demonstrate to our own country what these technologies look like,” Ohl said.
TEPCO Orders Second Kurion Mobile Processing System
Also this week, Kurion announced the Tokyo Electric Power Company has ordered a second mobile processing system to help with the water treatment at the Fukushima Daii-chi cleanup site. The company had delivered its first mobile processing system for the removal of strontium in October, and since its start date, the technology has exceeded performance targets, Kurion said. “We are honored to be entrusted by TEPCO build to build and deliver a second mobile system to remove strontium from the tank water at the Fukushima Daii-chi Nuclear Power Plant site,” Kurion President and Founder John Raymont said in a statement. “The successful performance of the first mobile processing system demonstrates that our novel, at-tank approach is effective and can help improve the safety of the site by reducing strontium levels. Our ability to deliver a system of this sophistication on an expected basis of less than three months is a tribute to our employees and fabrication partner, HiLine Engineering and Fabrication.”
The second system, expected to be in operation in mid-January, represents the continued growing influence Kurion has in the Fukushima cleanup. The company previously provided treatment at the cleanup site to remove cesium from groundwater back in 2011, and its system has processed about 240,000 cubic meters of water and is responsible for removing nearly 70 percent of all cesium activity at the site to date. According to Kurion, its initial mobile processing system has already processed approximately 11,000 metric tons of water with a 99.5 percent strontium removal rate.
