AREVA said that it had signed two service contracts this week, the first to supply fuel assemblies to the Trillo nuclear power plant in Spain and the second to carry out preventative chemical cleaning services of the steam generators at the Cattenom 2 nuclear power plant in France.
The Trillo plant is a one-reactor facility operated by CNAT (the Centrales Nucleares Almaraz-Trillo). The pressurized water reactor has a gross capacity of 1066 MWe. AREVA said the contract calls for fuel assembly reloads from 2017 to 2022, continuing a supply chain that has been in place since 1988, when the plant first reached criticality.
The fuel assemblies will be manufactured at the AREVA plant in Lingen, Germany.
AREVA has also signed a contract with EDF to provide cleaning services for the steam generators at the Cattenom 2 nuclear power plant in France. The contract also includes the treatment of associated effluents, AREVA said.
AREVA's cleaning system involves use of a chemical process that eliminates micro-deposits of iron and copper that may be present in the upper part of the steam generators. It avoids any risk of clogging and improves the overall performance of the equipment. The technique is very flexible to implement and can be applied during an outage, without interfering with maintenance operations.
Already used many times on other reactors part of EDF's nuclear fleet and on several reactors in the U.S., this solution is fully compliant with customers' technical and economic requirements.