We had a great dECOmm Open Business Day on 8th September to bring together Finnish and international suppliers and customers. We had online over 150 participants from business and research. Decommissioning gains attention, it deserves as a large global market. It is not bulldozer business but high-tech development and optimization of scarce resources.
We had keynote speakers from NPP owners, decommissioning service providers, digital platform companies and research organizations. Markus Airila told us about the VTT’s FiR1 research reactor decommissioning project at Otaniemi campus. VTT is moving into actual deconstruction phase. FiR1 has an important role in research and learning about decommissioning. We also heard about Ignalina NPP and Halden research reactor decommissioning projects. Must say that these are a very interesting set of quite different cases. Link to a recording of the morning session.
All you need to decommission an NPP is available. The question is, how you can make it safer, more efficient and quicker – how can you save money and reduce risk? The afternoon round table discussions were revolving around the same issues with topics “Players and their roles in the decommissioning market”, “8D (data) model as a solution” and “Automatisation in demolition brings value – but how”. These represent the big questions, who and how.
From the business point of view, there is also the third question, when. This question schedules the decommissioning projects due over the next decades and depends on owners’ and authorities’ decision to go for “greenfield” or “brownfield” solution. It is challenging to know the answer in most of the cases since it depends on the reusability of the site, financing, location, general opinion, future technologies and many other decision criteria. Why not just remove the fuel, refurbish the site for SMR, and continue power production? These are the questions we will continue to ask in the dECOmm project.
We will arrange next dECOmm OBD in 2021, and you are welcome to join us live or virtually.
Also welcome to the sibling ecosystem project EcoSMR Open Business Day in 2021.
Senior Scientist
dECOmm Project Manager