AREVA recently offered the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) a customized radioactive waste cleanup proposal that earned the multinational company a five-year contract.
Specifically, AREVA will take part in decontaminating the commission’s Atelier de Decontamination, d’Expertise et de Conditionnement (ADEC) facility in Saclay, which is in the Ile-de-France region. The contract secures AREVA’s specialized activity there for several years and strengthens its work in the decontamination and dismantling (D&D) field.
“AREVA’s Dismantling and Services Business was created for this reason: to bring together in one entity our expertise in D&D to propose custom-made solutions,” an AREVA spokesperson recently told Power News Wire.
The ADEC facility previously served as a decontamination, packaging and appraisal facility for the commission for almost 60 years. AREVA’s dismantling and services division will clean and decontaminate the roughly 24,000-square-foot area and eliminate stored radioactive waste at the facility, according to the spokesperson.
“As in this case, the proposition to set up a laboratory on site in order to gain time during the site operations was particularly important for our customer,” the spokesperson said.
With this new CEA contract, the spokesperson told Power News Wire that AREVA’s “priority right now is to execute this contract and meet the customer’s expectations.”
Regarding D&D in particular, the spokesperson said that AREVA plans “to continue our role as market leader, notably alongside the CEA.”
The spokesperson also told Power News Wire that AREVA – which has 45 years of experience on a wide range of complex projects — has “unique expertise in this field, including the ability to act as the contracting authority or as project manager on the cleanup for all types of nuclear projects.”
For instance, AREVA began preparations this month to ship nuclear waste from France to Australia as part of a contract with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization; and in the United States, AREVA TN recently signed a multi-year contract to provide dry fuel storage management services to Xcel Energy’s nuclear generating plants in Minnesota.
