The Wood Group and AREVA Projets SAS said Wednesday they had partnered to win a contract to extract 50 metric tons of radioactive waste from a French nuclear facility and prepare it for storage.
The low- and medium-level, short-lived waste is magnesium cladding generated by processing of natural uranium-graphite-gas fuels at three former reactors at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission’s research facility at Marcoule, according to an AREVA press release.
The waste has been held at Marcoule for over five decades, Wood said in its own release.
The value of the contract was not immediately made public. It includes project management, safety case, design, commissioning, and six months of operations.
Wood’s work will involve designing a remote-controlled robot arm to extract waste elements from the storage silo and to design a manufacturing unit for encapsulation. The waste would ultimately be placed in a geologic repository.
Operations are expected to last five years, the companies said.
AREVA Projets is the engineering branch of New AREVA, a nuclear fuel-cycle business formed in the restructuring of French nuclear giant AREVA.
Wood is a venerable U.K. project and technical services firm that earlier this month completed the acquisition of Amec Foster Wheeler.
