Happy Friday and happy Fourth of July, nuke-watchers. Before you fire up the grill for the weekend, here are some other stories RadWaste Monitor was tracking across the civilian nuclear power space this week.
Jacobs to decommission Norwegian nuclear facilities
Engineering and professional services company Jacobs announced this week that it had been selected by Norway’s nuclear decommissioning authority to dismantle two of the country’s nuclear sites.
Norsk Nukleær Dekommisjonering (NND) Wednesday chose a joint venture between the Dallas-based Jacobs and the Norwegian Multiconsult Norge AS for the decommissioning job, according to a press release from Jacobs.
The six-year multi-award contract framework is valued at around $100 million, the release said, and will focus on “engineering concept design and planning of new facilities, upgrading of existing nuclear and non-nuclear facilities and supporting NND with technical documentation, as well as preparing safety cases to meet ownership and operating license requirements.”
Jacobs’ work will initially focus on two Norwegian nuclear sites near Oslo: the Halden test reactor, shut down in 2018, and the JEEP-II neutron scattering facility, which went offline in 2019.
Decommissioning work on both sites should take a total of 20 to 25 years and cost around $1.96 billion, Jacobs said.
Ukraine invasion ‘deeply threatens’ international spent fuel convention, U.S. says
The United States’ delegation at an international radioactive waste management convention this week accused Russia of running afoul of the event’s goals of safe spent fuel storage and disposal, according to a statement.
Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine “deeply threatens all the core objectives” of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, the U.S. said in a written statement dated Wednesday.
The Joint Convention, formed in 1997, is the IAEA’s legal review panel for spent fuel safety issues. According to the agency, the program establishes “fundamental safety principles” for radioactive waste management and uses a peer review process among agreement states.
According to the U.S., Moscow’s invasion runs afoul of a number of the Joint Convention’s core principles, such as ensuring adequate protection of spent fuel against potential hazards and preventing “accidents with radiological consequences.”
“It is essential that in the spirit of international peer review, we, the Contracting Parties of the Joint Convention, do not ignore these threats to our core objectives,” the U.S. statement read.
Russian forces in the early days of the invasion captured Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as well as the shuttered Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Fighting at the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia plant triggered a fire in a training building nearby one reactor and sparked fears of a potential radiological release, although none occurred.
Occupying forces at Chernobyl pulled out in late March amid reports that some soldiers had been exposed to radiation.
