WITH nuclear laboratories and engineering test facilities in Warrington, Amentum has secured positions on a new multi-billion-pound framework to deliver expert decommissioning solutions for the Sellafield nuclear site.
Under the 15-year Decommissioning and Nuclear Waste Partnership (DNWP), Amentum will carry out remediation work on disused facilities and retrieve hazardous waste from legacy ponds on the site in Cumbria, England.
After competitive tendering, Sellafield Ltd selected Amentum as the remediation partner for work inside the site’s High Security Area and also selected The Decommissioning Alliance (TDA), a joint venture comprising Amentum, AtkinsRéalis and Westinghouse, as pond retrievals partner. The share of the work that could be awarded to Amentum is up to an estimated value of £1.4 billion ($1.9 billion USD).
“We will bring world-class, multidisciplinary, end-to-end engineering and project management capabilities to the UK’s most significant nuclear legacy challenges while also delivering outstanding performance on safety, collaboration, social impact and key supply chain management,” said Loren Jones, senior vice president, Amentum Energy & Environment–International.
“Our reputation for safe, reliable delivery and the unceasing drive for innovation to answer our client’s evolving needs make us the ideal partner to advance the Sellafield mission,” said Mark Whitney, president of Amentum Energy & Environment.
As remediation partner, Amentum’s focus will be on waste-led decommissioning, including clearance of redundant buildings to make land available for beneficial re-use and preparatory decommissioning work on the UK’s oldest nuclear reactor complexes and fuel handling facilities.
Amentum will deploy a full suite of technical offerings during remediation to optimise end-states integration including: digital visualisation to aid engineering design; geospatial data analysis for topographical surveys; robotics and augmented reality; and Threadsafe, an AI-based tool which uses natural language processing and knowledge graphs to map relationships in interlinked document sets such as nuclear safety cases.
As ponds partner, TDA will retrieve hazardous radiological material from the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond and the Pile Fuel Storage Pond, so that it can be treated and moved to modern storage and disposal facilities.
To accelerate retrievals, Amentum will deploy pioneering, robot-operated technology such as the Bulk Sludge Retrieval Tool, a vacuum suction system for safely removing radioactive sludge from nuclear fuel ponds and pumping it away for processing and packaging. Remotely operated vehicles will be used for inspection, sampling, retrieval, cutting and handling of waste in high-radiation zones, enabling safer and more efficient high-hazard reduction, while innovative methods for transferring radioactive waste from storage skips into shielded containers will improve efficiency by reducing overall volumes.
The DNWP framework covers operational nuclear facilities and those which are undergoing post-operational clean out, decommissioning and demolition.
Sellafield Ltd expects spending on remediation to increase between now and 2040, subject to public spending constraints, as more facilities on the site cease operations. The DNWP framework will be Sellafield’s route to market for end-to-end, high-hazard risk reduction programs.
