Costain Group Secures $481 Million Contract for Nuclear Waste Disposal at Sellafield

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Costain Group plc (LSE:COST) (Maidenhead, United Kingdom) has been awarded an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract, including inactive commissioning, for the Evaporator D nuclear waste disposal project at the nuclear complex located in Sellafield, Cumbria, in northwestern England.

The contract, worth $481 million, is an extension of the front-end engineering and design (FEED) order for the same project that Costain obtained in September 2006 from Sellafield Limited (Risley, United Kingdom), formerly the British Nuclear Group. Sellafield Limited is responsible for contracts pertaining to decommissioning and plant cleanup on behalf of the U.K.'s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

The original contract value was estimated at $145 million and covered the development, definition, and design of facilities intended to extend Sellafield's ability to process nuclear waste materials and ultimately reduce the amount of waste stored onsite.

The Sellafield site currently includes three existing evaporators--A, B and C--in the Highly Active Liquor Evaporative Capacity complex. The new Evaporator D will be used to evaporate the highly active raffinate that is produced during reprocessing. The evaporation process concentrates the raffinate to a highly active liquid, which is then stored before feeding to the waste vitrification plant, which renders the highly active liquid immobile so that it can be stored for longer before eventual disposal.

The proposed Evaporator D building will contain 15 in-cell modules. The largest of these will be 27 meters tall and will use 300 tons of specialist steel and more than 21 kilometers of pipe-works connected by approximately 10,000 welds. The building will contain 396 plant items and is scheduled for completion in 2014.

One of the innovations used by Costain in the construction of the Evaporator D building will be the use of off-site construction. Much of the construction will consist of modules, which will be constructed off-site and then shipped to the site by sea, floated across the Rivers Ehen and Barrow to Workington, and finally completing the journey by rail to the Sellafield site. Costain claims that the use of off-site construction and modularization reduces the risk involved and leads to adherence to schedule.

The safe and efficient management of nuclear waste is an important part of the U.K. government's plans for the Nuclear New Build program, which was announced in January 2008. The program was developed to address the problems of climate change and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, reduce the UK's reliance on imported gas, and contribute to long-term price stability.

The NDA works closely with international waste management organizations across the globe to share ideas and experience. For instance, the NDA's disposal concept of burying high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel in crystalline rock was developed in consultation with the Swedish company Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB (Stockholm), Switzerland's National Cooperative for Disposal of Radioactive Waste and the Japanese Nuclear Waste Management Organization.

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