Spain’s GDES said on 24 July that it had been awarded a contract to provide qualified manpower for the dismantling service at Sweden’s Barsebäck and Oskarshamn nuclear power plants. The project, awarded by Uniper Anlagenservice GmbH, starts in July 2020 and will run for four years.
The service will be executed in two separate phases two years at Barsebäck and two years at Oskarshamn) with the participation of up to 12 technicians and specialists and will involve cutting various components from the dismantling of the reactors at both plants.
Specifically, GDES will deliver post-segmentation work on four reactor pressure vessels, as well as the cutting and dismantling of the inlet and outlet lines of the hydraulic control rod drive housings, using special bespoke equipment designed and manufactured by Uniper.
It is GDES’s first decommissioning contract in Sweden. Its bid was supported by more than 40 years’ experience in the nuclear industry, participating in the construction of the major Spanish NPPs during the 1970s and 1980s, then in their maintenance, and now in their decommissioning, including at Vandellós I and José Cabrera projects, among others.
Héctor Dominguis, GDES CEO, said the contract also means a return to the company’s roots, in the 1970s at Sweden’s Ringhals NPP. where it began to diversify its services: “It was in Sweden where we first had the opportunity to learn about refuelling support services. That was the starting point for many of the services we still provide today in the nuclear industry.”
