Areva Dismantling and Services has signed a five-year contract with the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to clean-up of one of their facilities at the Saclay site, in the Ile-de-France region.

The contract valued at several million euros is to restore the Atelier de Décontamination, d’Expertise et de Conditionnement (ADEC) facility to radiologically clean conditions. ADEC was the decontamination, appraisal and packaging facility originally commissioned in 1962 and shut down in 2011.

Areva is contracted to clean up a 2250 square metre area containing both solid and liquid radioactive wastes. The work includes the entire process involved in restoring the premises to radiological clean conditions, from the initial inventory and characterisation of the waste through to its final conditioning for transportation and storage. The teams deployed will use the processes available at the facility after a re-commissioning phase and organize the treatment of waste zone by zone. A characterization laboratory will be set up on site for sample analysis to support the field operations

Alain Vandercruyssen, director of the Areva Dismantling and Services business said the contract secures Areva’s activity in Ile-de-France for several years and strengthens its historical relationship with CEA in decontamination and dismantling. "We were able to put together a customized offer for the CEA, meeting their requirements in terms of project management, servicing of the installations and radiological qualification," he added