Radioactive Waste Management and Radiation Protection
Amentum offers a full suite of radiological support services, including the development of radiological health and safety plans, site or facility radiological surveys, safety analyses, and waste disposition. Our experience spans numerous DOE and DoD sites, ensuring the safe handling, management, and remediation of radiological waste. We have managed the U.S.’s only deep geologic repository for nuclear waste and the U.K.’s principal facility for low-level waste disposal, demonstrating our capability in managing complex radioactive waste challenges.
Amentum uses intrusive sampling operations, fingerprint derivation and in-situ measurements from a range of materials, including reactor bio-shields, concrete, metals, sludges, fuel element debris and ion exchange resins, with full-range sample analysis delivered by our own radiochemistry laboratories.
In the UK, Amentum employs more than 100 radioactive waste management professionals whose work includes compiling the UK’s radioactive waste inventory and advising government company Nuclear Waste Services on key programs such as the proposed Geological Disposal Facility, as well as delivering a broad range of environmental and engineering services, backed by scientific and technical expertise. Our facilities include a cobalt-60 gamma irradiation facility, crucial for our global consultancy on radiation effects.
Many waste facilities were built without any clear plan for retrieval, treatment and long-term storage. We are working to address this at sites like Sellafield, where we are installing Silo Emptying Plant machines to remove waste at the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo, Europe’s most hazardous building.
Waste disposal and storage costs vary immensely according to level of activity. Amentum brings value by applying our experience of designing and delivering systems to retrieve, pre-treat and treat radioactive waste, including the ability to set up treatment plants at the client’s site.
Our proprietary SIAL® solidification technology allows on-site, room temperature conditioning of various standard and problematic radioactive waste streams including resins, sludge, liquid or crystalline borates, oils, other organic liquids, concentrates, and ashes. To date, SIAL® has been used successfully to immobilize thousands of tons of waste from nuclear power plants in Slovakia and the Czech Republic and cited as an example of good practice by the World Association of Nuclear Operators.
Amentum has unique graphite knowledge, gained from our heritage as designer and architect engineer of the U.K.’s first- and second-generation power reactors. Our Waste Management team draws on this long history of working with graphite to support technical programs for safe and timely characterization, retrieval, waste treatment, storage and geological disposal.
