Holtec secures contract for Slovenian storage facility

Monday, 27 February 2017

Holtec International has won a contract for the turnkey supply of a dry cask storage facility at the Krško nuclear power plant in Slovenia. The value of the contract was not disclosed.

The initial decision by Nuklearna Elektrana Krško (NEK) to award the contract to Holtec in May last year was "strenuously protested" by Areva, Holtec said, and led to "nine months of independent expert reviews under the auspices of the country's National Review Commission". The project schedule has been "strained to accommodate this process", Richard Springman, Holtec's director of international projects, said in a company statement on 24 February.

The contract includes the design and construction of a dry storage building, replacement of the fuel handling building crane trolley, and supply of equipment and services.

The building is to be a fully equipped canister or cask handling facility with a temperature and radiation monitoring system, and equipment and systems to "safely execute rarely needed activities such as severing a welded canister lid", Holtec said.

The casks and storage facility will be licensed in Slovenia, with additional performance criteria imposed by NEK to demonstrate safety against severe environmental phenomena and other modern hazards.

Holtec's high capacity HI-STORM FW cask, is already in use at several sites. Its high thermal capacity HI-STAR 190 transport cask will "provide the flexibility" for transport of the fuel off-site within seven years from the time of loading if a central storage or final disposal facility were to become available, Holtec said.

Holtec will fabricate the majority of the equipment at its Heavy Manufacturing Plant at its Technology Campus in Camden, New Jersey.

The 696 MWe Krško plant is a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor and was the first western nuclear power plant in eastern Europe. Construction started in 1975 and it was connected to the grid in 1981, entering commercial operation in 1983.

In 2001 its steam generators were replaced and the plant was uprated 6% then and 3% subsequently. Its operating period was to be 40 years, but a 20-year extension was confirmed in mid-2015, subject to inspections in 2023 and 2033.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News