Westinghouse Wins German Decommissioning Contract

A Westinghouse-led consortium has won the contract to dismantle the reactor pressure vessel and its internals at the Philippsburg Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 in Germany. The scope for this contract, which includes the planning, equipment manufacture and on-site segmentation of the reactor vessel internals and the reactor vessel, including peripheral structures, will be done by a consortium comprising NUKEM Technologies Engineering Services GmbH (NTES) and GNS Gesellschaft für Nuklear-Service mbH, with Westinghouse as the lead, the company announced. “We are very pleased to be awarded this contract,” said Norbert Haspel, Westinghouse vice president and managing director, Central Europe. “Because of our strong teamwork, we have developed a customer-oriented and optimized solution leveraging the strength of each of the partners. With this project we are able to sustain our fruitful cooperation with EnBW through the deployment of safe, proven Westinghouse technology to their decommissioning activities.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, Germany moved to shut down all of its nuclear plants in an effort to avoid any future accidents. Eight nuclear reactors were permanently shut down in March 2011, and 17 are planned to be phased out by 2022.