Remote equipment is used to remove components from the Garigliano reactor vessel. (Photo: Sogin)
Sogin (Società Gestione Impianti Nucleari), the state-owned company responsible for the decommissioning of Italy’s nuclear plants and the management of radioactive waste, announced on July 30 that it has completed the first phase of dismantling Garigliano nuclear power plant’s reactor vessel with the removal of contaminated metal components from the deflector.
Located in Campania in southern Italy, Garigliano was a 150-MWe General Electric boiling water reactor that operated from 1964 to 1982. Sogin acquired the plant in 1999 to carry out its decommissioning.
The work: Sogin said that dismantlement operations, carried out together with its subsidiary Nucleco, began at the end of 2023 with the flooding of the vessel and the reactor channel, a step that provides natural radiation shielding during the segmentation of the reactor vessel.
During the first phase of the segmentation, working under water using a pneumatic clamp and special mechanical equipment, the components, located at the upper portion of the reactor vessel, were removed and cut to reduce their volume. The cutting equipment was operated remotely with the support of high-resolution underwater cameras. The treated components, weighing approximately one ton, were then placed in two high-integrity containers for temporary storage on site to await future transfer to Italy’s planned national repository for radioactive waste.
According to Sogin, dismantlement work will continue with the removal of the reactor vessel’s internal components, for which the executive design has already started, and finally with the dismantling of the vessel itself.
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