SPONSORED CONTENT | GNS GROUP
More than just the inventors of the Dual Purpose Casks!
Based on its unique nuclear experience of more than five decades, GNS offers comprehensive solutions for the management and disposal of spent fuel and all types of operational radioactive waste, as well as for the decommissioning and dismantling of nuclear power plants.
Below: MOSAIK® casks for ILW in front of CASTOR® casks for Spent Fuel and HLW at the GNS manufacturing site in Mülheim/Ruhr in Germany.
THROUGHOUT ITS 50-YEAR HISTORY, the German GNS Gesellschaft für Nuklear-Service mbH has always served the needs and requirements of its customers: the operators of nuclear power plants and nuclear facilities. Starting out as a packaging and transport specialist, GNS invented DCI containers for the transport and storage of ILW as early as the mid-1970s. These have long been known as MOSAIK® containers and, with almost 9,000 units, are now among the most successful heavy shielding containers in the world. Shortly afterwards, GNS engineers developed the
world’s first dual-purpose cask for spent fuel, the CASTOR®. The very first CASTOR® for long-term interim storage was loaded in Switzerland in 1983 with spent fuel from the Diorit research reactor at Paul-Scherrer-Institut. This cask was later transferred to the newly built Central Swiss Interim Storage Facility (ZWILAG). This is where it
has been safely stored until today, exactly 40 years after it was loaded and sealed. And it will be in storage for many years to come. Just like all the other 2,000 spent fuel and high-level waste containers of GNS’s own CASTOR® and CONSTOR® types that are in use today on four continents. This makes GNS the world’s leading supplier of shielded transport and storage casks, with firmly agreed deliveries to international customers until after 2040. For future disposal in deep geological repositories, GNS has already been commissioned to develop suitable packaging concepts.
Beyond Packaging But GNS is not only an expert in packaging: in response to customer demand, GNS also set up a waste management division in the 1980s. For more than three decades, GNS has been responsible for the management of all radioactive waste and spent fuel from the operation of the German nuclear power plants. Again in response to demand in Germany following the phase-out decision and the recent final shutdown, GNS has expanded its portfolio to include comprehensive solutions for all phases of decommissioning, from defueling to dismantling and packaging of reactor pressure vessels and their internals, as well as other primary circuit components. Sophisticated activation calculations enable efficient segmentation and packaging as well as minimum dose rates.
A Comprehensive Portfolio GNS provides products and services that include the design and manufacture of casks and containers for HLW, LLW and ILW and the packaging of waste, as well as the construction of facilities for conditioning and packaging of waste and the operation of conditioning facilities and preparations for final disposal. GNS treats and packages both solid and liquid radioactive waste to ensure the acceptability of the waste for interim storage and final disposal. This requires a large amount of data and information to be collected, documented and updated. For example, GNS provides sophisticated software and database solutions for tracking operational or decommissioning waste. The companies in the GNS Group have an annual turnover
of around €250 million and their 1,000 employees give their best every day to deliver: Excellence for Nuclear. ■
12 | June 2023 |
www.neimagazine.com
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