RW Monitor
9/11/2015
IN THE INDUSTRY
The U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council has scheduled its first-ever EM Roundtable for Thursday, Sept. 17, providing congressional, private sector, and Department of Energy perspectives on DOE’s environmental management programs. The session will address "DOE’s EM program: The Next Five Years," and will feature Mark Whitney, principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, along with staff from the Senate Appropriations and Energy and Natural Resources committees and Paul Grimm, president of BG4 LLC and chairman of the USNIC EM Task Force. The discussion will be led by Llewellyn King, founder of The Energy Daily and host of "White House Chronicle."
The event will begin at 8:30 a.m. at 562 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Constitution Avenue and First Street NE. Registration information is available on the www.usnic.org website or via Caleb Ward ([email protected]), and RSVPs are requested by Sept. 15.The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued late last week a Confirmatory Action Letter to International Isotopes that outlined agreed upon steps needed to be taken before resuming operations at its Idaho Falls, Idaho facility after a worker received a radiation dose there last month. The Aug. 20 incident occurred when a technician was preparing to transfer a shielded Cobalt-60 source into another shielded container and it became stuck. In attempting to move it, the worker received a brief radiation exposure, the NRC said. “We are conducting a follow-up inspection to better understand the circumstances that contributed to this incident and to evaluate actions that International Isotopes has taken to ensure their workers are adequately protected,” said NRC Region IV Administrator Marc Dapas. International Isotopes agreed to suspend similar transfers of radioactive materials at the facility until completion of corrective actions. The company has also agreed to provide the NRC with calculations and evaluations used to determine the worker’s radiation exposure, perform a detailed root cause analysis of the event, and describe corrective actions to prevent recurrence, the NRC said.
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.
