AECOM Chairman and CEO Michael Burke said Monday the international engineering and infrastructure company sees decommissioning of nuclear power plants as a potential $200 billion global market.
Burke also indicated that AECOM’s experience in cleaning up the legacy of U.S. Cold War nuclear operations, together with the company’s power expertise, makes it a natural for that growing reactor decommissioning business.
In December 2016, an AECOM-EnergySolutions team landed the roughly $1 billion general contract business for decommissioning the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California.
San Onofre “was a real test case for us to bring together our extensive power, construction expertise, our environmental engineering expertise, and most importantly, our federal government nuclear decommissioning expertise and put all that together,” Burke told financial analysts during AECOM’s quarterly earnings call.
Over the past couple years, nuclear operators have announced a number of premature retirements of power reactors in the United States, citing factors including weak power demand and competition from electricity generated by cheap natural gas. Six power reactors went into decommissioning from 2013 to 2016, while eight more are already scheduled for closure from 2018 to 2025, according to recent figures from the Nuclaer Regulatory Commission.
“Canada has an enormous nuclear decommissioning opportunity,” Burke said. “We’ve been spending time in Japan where they’re going to take down 35 reactors, we’ve been spending time in Taiwan where they’re going to take down a large reactor. So, I think we are positioned as well as anybody to benefit from that $200 billion market.”
