System Achieving Performance Goals for Throughput and Cesium Removal

IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kurion, Inc., an innovator in nuclear waste management, announced that as of August 17^th cesium levels in the contaminated water within the facilities of the tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant had dropped by more than 40% since startup of the Kurion Ion Specific Media System two months earlier on June 17^th. As a member of the site's unprecedented reactor water cooling Water Treatment Facility (see Cesium Adsorption Instruments), the design goal of the Kurion 50 MT/hour (220 gpm) rated system is to remove approximately 99.9% of the cesium, the principal source of radioactivity in the contaminated water. In fact, when originally operated in its design configuration the system was removing cesium by a factor of 70,000 (99.999% removal).

The reliability, safety, and robustness of the Kurion system was recently confirmed by the August 16^th analysis of Water Treatment Facility operations that shows, with the exception of a few initial operational missteps regarding incorrect valve alignments or having the system taken off line over dose buildup at the first skid (subsequently determined to originate from the upstream feed piping and not the Kurion vessels or media), the Kurion system has quick upset recovery mechanisms and no constraining radioactive hotspots.

The August 16^th analysis confirms that pump redundancy in the Kurion system allows for prompt resumption of operations following a pump trip, minimizing throughput impacts. In fact, because of its pump redundancies and high design margin the system has recently been operating at its design throughput with only three of its four lines, limited by the processing capacity of downstream Water Treatment Facility systems. Since its cesium removal technology is a passive approach, the Kurion system is capable of operating using no system pumps with sufficient pressure at the inlet connection.

Additional processing capacity (Cesium absorption Instruments No. 2) started up August 18^th with the goal of polishing the Kurion effluent by removing the small amount of remaining cesium or operating in parallel to increase the Water Treatment Facility processing rate to 100 MT/hour.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=6842578&lang=en

Contacts

Kurion, Inc.
Gaetan Bonhomme, 949-398-6350
fax: 949-682-7028
info@kurion.com

High Level Kurion System Process Diagram (Graphic: Business Wire)