Orano TN on Wednesday sealed a contract worth millions of dollars to refurbish and maintain three radioactive waste containers, and provide other services, to the United Kingdom’s LLW Repository Ltd.
The specific value of the contract is not being released for commercial reasons, an Orano spokesperson said by email Thursday.
LLW Repository Ltd. is charged with management of the U.K.’s low-level radioactive waste repository in West Cumbria, along with associated waste management operations across the nation. The TN Gemini containers will be used to move alpha-contaminated waste from the Magnox research reactor site at Harwell in Oxfordshire to the Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria for storage.
The packages already belong to the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which oversees cleanup of Magnox reactor facilities and other nuclear sites around the country. The four-year contract to Orano covers “the UK TN Gemini fleet refurbishment, auxiliary equipment procurement and expertise & technical services support for packages lifecycle management during operations (maintenance, traceability, license renewal, etc),” the spokesperson said.
The waste is held in 1,000 drums, some with a 100-liter capacity and others able to hold 220 liters of material. Alpha-contaminated material required a Type B cask such as the TN Gemini, according to the Orano spokesperson. Type B packages are used for shipments of highly radioactive material.
Orano TN is the logistics branch of Orano, the Paris-based nuclear fuel cycle company previously known as AREVA.
The company said Friday it had separately signed a “Roadmap of Collaboration” with the Nuclear Decommisioning Authority.”The purpose of this Roadmap is to establish how Orano and NDA will work together to identify projects they can share expertise and reduce the cost of decommissioning the civil nuclear legacy in the UK and France,” according to an Orano press release.
Orano to Begin Prepping Used Fuel Processing Facility in China
On Monday, Orano said it is moving ahead with operations to prepare for construction of a used nuclear fuel processing and recycling facility in China.
Orano engineering subsidiary Orano Projets finalized a deal with China National Nuclear Corp. branch CNLA to move ahead with the work. The agreement “marks a new step in the discussions to launch by the end of 2018 the project to build a recycling plant in China with a capacity of 800 tons,” Orano Projets Chairman Patrick Jacq said in a press release. “Some 100 people are mobilized within Orano to perform this preparatory work.”
The announcement did not discuss details of the preparatory work. Reuters quoted an Orano spokeswoman as saying the activity would focus on project management and quality control documentation, and would cost roughly 20 million euros ($23.4 million).
Ten years of discussions have not yet resulted in a deal for Orano to supply the plant technology itself, Reuters reported.
Orano as it exists today resulted from a corporate reorganization starting in 2016 that led to the sale of AREVA’s nuclear power business to French utility EDF and other entities. Orano now focuses on nuclear materials development and waste management, encompassing mining, conversion-enrichment, used fuel recycling, nuclear logistics, dismantlement, and engineering.
