A newly inked deal has paved the way for Veolia Nuclear Solutions to demonstrate its patented GeoMelt technology to process radioactive waste sent from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).
Under the agreement, announced Sept. 25, INL management and operations contractor Battelle Energy Alliance (BEA) will ship some drums with small amounts of radioactive contaminated sodium wastes to the Perma-Fix Northwest facility in Richland, Wash.
The residual sodium metal coolant from the Fermi nuclear power plant in Michigan, now housed at INL, will be processed as a treatability demonstration using the technology, said a spokesman for Veolia, Michael Crittenden.
Neither Veolia nor Battelle immediately offered details on the scope or cost of the testing, although the parties described it as a long-term agreement.
“We have a strategic, long-term plan to establish pathways for off-site treatment of difficult waste streams,” Bob Miklos, director of production facilities and treatment, storage and disposal facilities at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex, said in a news release.
“The BEA agreement for treatment of Fermi Drums is the first in what we hope will be a series of treatment demonstrations leading to eventual operations to treat and stabilize DOE and commercial reactive metal-containing waste,” Ryan Dodd, technology director at Veolia Nuclear Solutions – Federal Services, said in the same release.
The Veolia GeoMelt process involves in-container vitrification of sodium contaminated waste generated from some nuclear reactors. It turns the waste into a glass form for disposal.
GeoMelt has been around for a number of years, owned by Kurion before the company was bought by Veolia.
Jacobs Engineering said Tuesday it has secured two framework deals worth a total of $32 million to provide a range of services for the contractor handling decommissioning of the former Dounreay fast-reactor site in Scotland.
The Dallas-based company said in a press release it was among six companies “eligible to tender” for both four-year agreements from Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd. Jacobs is partial owner of the company that owns the contractor.
One agreement covers $15 million to $19 million worth of design and engineering services, including design, construction management, engineering, environmental remediation, and developing waste strategy documents. The other agreement covers $10 million to $13 million worth of safety case and peer review activities, including safety reporting and radiation and fire evaluations.
Further details about the work was not immediately available. Jacobs did not respond by deadline Friday to requests for comment.
Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd. is owned by Cavendish Dounreay Partnership, a joint venture of Jacobs, AECOM, and Cavendish Nuclear. It is charged with decommissioning and site restoration of the property in Caithness County, which from 1955 to 1994 hosted research and development of nuclear energy technology. The facility is the largest nuclear cleanup job in Scotland.
Idaho Falls-based nuclear medicine specialist International Isotopes on Tuesday said it had been awarded over 12 distinct contracts worth a total of $1.6 million for recovery of radiation sources in the United States and abroad.
The Department of Energy issued all the contracts, with the work largely to wrap up within half a year, according to a press release from the company. In each case, International Isotopes will decommission retired radiation therapy and irradiation systems.
The business will further strengthen International Isotopes’ radiological services segment, which for the first half of 2018 boosted revenue by 178 percent on a year-over-year basis, the release says.
The company employs a mobile hot cell that can be installed at a facility for source recovery. The work is housed within International Isotopes’ radiological field services business line, which in 2017 represented 18 percent of the company’s total revenue.
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