In October, Orano USA finished cutting up and packaging the vessel for the Unit 3 reactor of the shuttered Crystal River Nuclear Plant in Florida, the company announced this week.
Orano USA, the Bethesda, Md.-based U.S. arm of the French nuclear company, announced in August it had started cutting the reactor into pieces. The parts of the segmented vessel that qualify as greater-than-class-C radioactive will be stored on site at the deactivated plant on Florida’s central Gulf coast.
Orano USA packed the reactor vessel full of low-level waste resulting from the vessel’s removal from the power plant core, then poured concrete-like grout into the vessel to solidify the mixture of waste. Once the grout solidified, the company cut the cemented reactor into three pieces, according to Wednesday’s press release.
Accelerated Decommission Partners, a joint venture of Orano USA and NorthStar Group, are decommissioning Crystal River Unit 3 under a contract that was worth $540 million at the time of its award in 2017 by plant owner Duke Energy. At the time, the joint venture planned to have the plant down by 2027. Crystal River Unit 3 operated for 33 years in Citrus County, Fla., from 1976 to 2020.
With the reactor vessel removed from the plant, NorthStar will begin demolishing the reactor building, Orano USA wrote in its press release.
