IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kurion, Inc., an innovator in nuclear waste management, announced that it completed the initial delivery a week and a half ago of several hundred tons of equipment and its Ion Specific Media to support its key role to remove radioactivity from contaminated water at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Kurion engineers started arriving at the Fukushima site a week ago Wednesday with more arriving over the next two weeks to support system installation, commissioning and startup mid-June. The Kurion system is part of an unprecedented effort by an international team of leading radioactive waste management companies to quickly deliver a large contaminated water processing system. Kurion is the sole American company in this historic water processing effort.

The overall processing system has several stages including debris and oil removal, radioactivity removal (Kurion’s role), and desalinization. The goal is to process radioactive contaminated water presently in the turbine buildings, along with new cooling water added daily, and return the purified water to the plant for recycle as reactor cooling water. For defense in depth a second radioactivity removal system is being developed and delivered by Areva of France.

Kurion CEO John Raymont said: “The Kurion system was designed and fabricated on a 24-hour/day 7 day per week basis with many redesigns as the customer’s specifications were modified repeatedly as new data was learned from the damaged plant. Despite constantly evolving specifications the principal equipment and Ion Specific Media were delivered in an extraordinarily short five weeks after approval to proceed. This has been an unprecedented project and level of effort to compress into weeks what took 18-months to prepare for the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant accident water cleanup. All parties from TEPCO to Kurion to our system fabricators should be applauded for their personal commitment and sacrifices to getting the job done right under intense pressure.”

Kurion Vice President and Project Director Richard Keenan said: “The design goals were for a system that would be reliable, isotope removal flexible by being able to adjust media combinations, based on lessons learned from Three Mile Island, U.S. DOE operations, and nuclear plant operations world-wide, and based on industry standard demineralization processing technology utilizing Kurion’s extraordinary Ion Specific Media.”

For Kurion this is the first phase of a recommended two stage processing sequence. The stages follow the logic demonstrated during the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant cleanup where radioactivity was removed from water by inorganic sorbent media then volume reduced and permanently immobilized by converting it into a glass matrix using vitrification (the gold standard of waste stabilization). The substrate (base) material that formed the TMI sorbent media is now exclusively distributed by Kurion and used in the fabrication of its Ion Specific Media. Kurion has dramatically enhanced the performance of sorbent media and state of the art for vitrification since TMI from a cost and throughput standpoint. As discussed in “Two Novel Solutions”, the feature article in the December issue of Radwaste Solutions magazine, the high performing Kurion Modular Vitrification System is transformative in terms of changing the cost and schedule for vitrification.

The Kurion processing system and Ion Specific Media will remove targeted radioactive isotopes (atoms) from the water that threaten both human health and the environment. By being able to vitrify its Ion Specific Media, Kurion offers the additional benefit of a volume-reduced stable waste form that minimizes handling, storage, shipping, and disposal costs and uniquely isolates isotopes from the environment.

ABOUT KURION

KURION PROVIDES INNOVATIVE, EASILY DEPLOYABLE TECHNOLOGIES TO ACCELERATE PROJECT PERFORMANCE AND COMPLIANCE AND SUBSTANTIALLY REDUCE CUSTOMER RADIOACTIVE WASTE MANAGEMENT LIFE-CYCLE COSTS. FOUNDED IN 2008, KURION IS BACKED BY LEADING ENERGY INVESTORS LUX CAPITAL MANAGEMENT AND FIRELAKE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT. HEADQUARTERED IN IRVINE, CA, KURION OPERATES A R&D FACILITY IN OAK RIDGE, TN AND A TEST FACILITY IN ROLLA, MO. FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE VISIT WWW.KURION.COM.

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