CNIM Wins Three Nuclear Handling Contracts

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--French nuclear services company CNIM (Paris) has won three contracts from separate nuclear energy companies to develop and supply nuclear handling systems for facilities in the U.K. Finland and Ukraine.

In the U.K., CNIM has been selected by Électricité de France SA (EPA:EDF) (Paris, France) as its preferred bidder for the design, manufacturing and installation of a spent fuel unloading system for the two European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) units at the new Hinkley Point C project in Somerset.

"CNIM has already supplied such equipment to a number of power stations in France, Finland and China," explained Ludovic Vandendriesche, CNIM's director of Nuclear Activities. "We are delighted to be working with EDF Energy to help deliver what will be the first new nuclear power station in the U.K. in a generation."

In Finland, nuclear waste management company Posiva Oy (Olkiluoto, Finland), has contracted CNIM to engineer three fuel handling and transfer machines for the Encapsulation Unit currently being built at the Onkalo deep repository site. It will become the world's first permanent storage facility for spent nuclear waste. These will include:

• the cask transfer trolley, which will convey the fuel assembly transportation casks to beneath the hot cell;
• the fuel handling machine, which will transfer fuel assemblies from the transportation casks into their copper canisters;
• the canister trolley, which will move the copper canisters through the various stages of the process (welding, machining, inspection) before taking them to the buffer zone, from which they will descend by elevator to the disposal tunnels 500 metres below the granite.

"Posiva Oy sets very high quality requirements," noted Ludovic Vandendriesche. "To meet them, we decided to perform the entire process at our La Seyne-sur-Mer site in France, which will guarantee over 20,000 hours of engineering work in the coming years."

In Ukraine, CNIM will build the maintenance trolley for the Main Crane System (MCS), which will be used in dismantling the old sarcophagus erected after the 1986 Chernobyl accident and the damaged reactor itself. Due to the very high levels of radiation directly above the reactor, the maintenance trolley will be equipped with a lead-lined cabin positioned on a telescopic rail.

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