Decommissioning & Waste Management Overview

Radioactive waste management is the process of sustainably dealing with contaminated or activated items from a nuclear facility that have come to the end of their useful life. These wastes may arise from routine operations, off-design incidents, repairs, and maintenance or decommissioning at the end of a facility's useful life. They include everything from the highly radioactive used nuclear fuel down to the disposable shoe covers used to stop personal footwear from becoming contaminated. Often it is just soil or building materials that may or may not be contaminated. With high costs for final disposal, radioactive waste management typically involves identifying the physical, chemical, and radiological form of the waste and identifying the optimum way for it to be segregated, categorized, processed, and packaged to minimize cost and overall impact on the environment.

Nuclear decommissioning is the process of retiring a nuclear facility from service and safely progressing it toward its desired end state. It is normally undertaken in stages, often involving dismantling and demolition, typically giving rise to contaminated or activated wastes that must then be managed.

Decommissioning and waste management are often grouped because the waste management options typically prescribe the decommissioning process to be used.

We use our operational experience, as well as our project management and design expertise, to support all aspects of decommissioning and waste management for all types of nuclear facilities. We leverage our laboratories to analyze and categorize materials, our licensed facilities allow us to segregate, decontaminate, treat and package wastes, and our engineers develop decommissioning plans, as well as design and build specialized dismantling tools.

Key Benefits

  • Real Life Experience

    We have hands on experience in all aspects of decommissioning and waste management including planning, surveying, processing, packaging and disposal.

  • History of Innovation

    If the technology, equipment or process that you need does not exist, then our renowned radiochemists and our engineering designers can develop it for you.

  • Experts in Decommissioning Planning

    We combine our detailed knowledge of regulatory requirements, safety assessment capabilities, understanding of final waste disposal options and our design & planning expertise to deliver approaches to achieve the desired end state safely and efficiently, with minimum environmental impact.

  • Comprehensive Capabilities

    Whether you need to establish the inventory, develop a decommissioning plan, have challenging waste forms processed or want to sub-contract entire decommissioning tasks to a third party, we can help.