Decontamination and Decommissioning

Constellation Energy has announced that it will seek to restart Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania as part of an agreement with Microsoft to power that company’s data centers. Given the growing interest by tech companies in using clean, reliable nuclear power to meet their growing energy demands, the September 20 announcement to reopen TMI-1, which was shut down and defueled in 2019, was not a huge surprise.

Soon, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will for the first time begin using drones to internally inspect radioactive liquid waste tanks at the department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Inspections were previously done using magnetic wall-crawling robots.

The pursuit of returning two of the country’s retired nuclear plants into service is not only unusual—it is unprecedented and promises to make history.

That’s according to a piece coauthored by former assistant secretary for nuclear energy Katy Huff in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists regarding plans from Holtec and Constellation to restart Michigan’s Palisades plant and Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island Unit 1, respectively.

Chantilly, Va.-based Amentum has been awarded a 7-year contract estimated to be worth €5.5 million (about $6 million) to consult on the dismantling of steam drum separators in Units 1 and 2 of Lithuania’s Ignalina nuclear power plant. Once the country’s largest generator of electricity, Ignalina was permanently shut down in 2009 and the plant’s two RBMK-1500 reactors are expected to be fully decommissioned by 2038.

The U.S. Navy’s Surface Ship Support Barge, converted in the 1960s from a WWII T2 tanker to a support barge to accept spent nuclear fuel during the refueling of nuclear aircraft carriers, was dismantled and disposed of by the nuclear decommissioning company APTIM as a first-of-its-kind vessel dismantlement project for the Navy. The project was executed under contract with Naval Sea Systems Command; however, regulatory oversight was accomplished through an interagency framework agreement between the U.S. Navy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Despite progress made over the past years, the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has not seen an adequate return on investment in cleaning up the Sellafield nuclear site on England’s Cumbria coast, according to a new report by the U.K.’s National Audit Office, which scrutinizes government spending.

The Department of Energy is proposing to fully decommission the Submarine 5th Generation General Electric (S5G) prototype at the Naval Reactors Facility on the Idaho National Laboratory site. Along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Idaho, the DOE has initiated a 30-day public comment period (ending November 14) on the planned end state for the facility and its defueled reactor vessel.

With the recent mobilization at the site of the former SM-1A nuclear power plant at Fort Greely, Alaska, the Radiological Health Physics Regional Center of Expertise, located at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Baltimore District, began its work toward the decommissioning and dismantlement of its third nuclear power plant, this time located just 175 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Robotics is fast becoming a go-to for nuclear decommissioning advances, and several organizations working in West Cumbria, England, the hub of the United Kingdom’s energy sector, have formed a partnership to share insight and work together to address common challenges and opportunities. Cumbria Robotics Cluster is an ambitious initiative powered by the Industrial Solutions Hub (iSH) to harness and expand the region’s renowned capabilities in cutting-edge engineering and problem solving.

In October 2012, Dominion Energy announced it was closing the Kewaunee nuclear power plant, a two-loop 574-MWe pressurized water reactor located about 27 miles southeast of Green Bay, Wis., on the western shore of Lake Michigan. At the time, Dominion said the plant was running well, but that low wholesale electricity prices in the region made it uneconomical to continue operation of the single-unit merchant power plant.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is soliciting public comment on the agency’s guidance for addressing discrete radioactive particle (DRP) contamination resulting from the decontamination and decommissioning of nuclear facilities. According to the NRC, the draft guidance is intended to avoid any inconsistencies in how the agency approaches DRP contamination.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the government agency charged with cleaning up the United Kingdom’s nuclear sites, has awarded three contracts totaling £30 million (about $39 million) for research into new decommissioning techniques.

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.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $630 million to Louisiana-based Aptim Federal Services for deactivation and decommissioning work at two U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program sites in New York.

By an order dated April 25, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved the transfer of ownership of Vallecitos Nuclear Center from GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to NorthStar Group Services for nuclear decontamination, decommissioning, and environmental site restoration.

The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has sent a final rule for decommissioning reactors to the commissioners for consideration. If approved, the new rulemaking would incorporate lessons learned from nuclear power plants that have recently transitioned to decontamination and decommissioning and would improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the regulatory framework.

It’s not every day that local police departments find nuclear missiles in garages. But that’s what the bomb squad of the Bellevue, Washington, police department encountered on February 1 when they responded to a call. Fortunately, the missile turned out to be inert. It was a McDonnell Douglas AIR-2A Genie unguided air-to-air rocket (once known as an MB-1), which was designed to carry a 1.5 kiloton W25 nuclear warhead, but there was no warhead on the rusted rocket in the garage.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and its cleanup contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project have removed the largest of nine tanks from a liquid waste cell as part of the ongoing demolition of the Main Plant Process Building, the office announced on February 6.

The state of Massachusetts is looking to require Holtec, the owners of the Pilgrim nuclear power plant, to analyze water evaporation at the plant for potential air pollution as the unit is decommissioned.

At a hearing this week with a state Department of Environmental Protection panel, officials said that more study is needed on nonradioactive contaminants in about 1 million gallons of water that Holtec has proposed discharging into Cape Cod Bay.

The Department of Energy announced that its Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) is moving ahead with a slate of projects this year that will alter the Tennessee site’s skyline, remove inventories of nuclear waste, and complete a major phase of cleanup.