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Marlton firm snags a big contract in UkraineMarlton

Holtec International rang up a big deal this month when it inked a seven-year, $150 million contract to build a nuclear-waste storage site in Ukraine. The Marlton-based firm specializes in designing and building facilities that allow the operators of atomic energy plants to safely store the radioactive waste they produce.

The new project will start immediately and construction will take about three years, says Holtec spokesperson Joy Russell. The company will then stay on for at least four years to store the waste as it is produced and train local people to run the facility, she says.

“They [the nuclear power plants] have to start slowly and ramp up,” says Frank Bongrazio, Holtec’s CFO.

Ukraine, the home of the Chernobyl plant that exploded in 1986, has been shipping its nuclear waste to Russia, the closest disposal point to the country. The new Ukrainian facility will be similar to one that Holtec built for the Hope Creek nuclear power station in Salem County. It will save money for Ukraine, which depends on nuclear energy for almost half its electricity, says Russell.

“We are able to store more fuel assemblies in the same container [as the other project bidders],” says Kris Singh, president and co-founder of the company. “Our system is more secure, more conducive to public health.”

Singh says Holtec’s superior technology helped it win over two larger firms to snag the Ukrainian contract. “We were competing with Atomstroyexport, a nationally owned company in Russia, and Areva, a nationally owned company in France,” he says. “They were two bigger companies and we beat them. They had more people, but we have better technology.” Competitors’ bids were not disclosed.

Holtec’s system will store the waste in individual casks that will be placed in bunker-style overpacks, says Steve Agace, program manager for cask operations. Agace says the casks are “honeycomb-style, egg-crate containers” about 16 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter. Agace, an 11-year veteran of nuclear engineering who previously worked for the state’s Department of Energy, says the 10-inch-thick lids of the casks are welded shut once the waste is deposited. As in Hope Creek, the walls of the overpack will consist of 27 inches of concrete sandwiched between two 1-inch-thick layers of carbon steel.

“The way we put concrete and steel together, it is conducive to radiation shielding,” Singh says. “We have analyzed it and the government has analyzed it. The facility could be struck with an airplane” without causing a leak.

The Ukrainian contract has “limitless potential” and the $150 million is just a start, Singh says. As Ukraine produces more nuclear waste, Singh says Holtec will keep enlarging the facility—and the money will keep rolling in.

Holtec didn’t just jump into booking multimillion-dollar deals. The company, founded in 1986 with three employees, was lucky to get contracts worth $1 million and $2 million at first, says Singh.

But it has been growing 10% annually, says Bongrazio, and posted revenue of $80 million last year, up from about $72 million in 2004. Holtec has 300 employees spread throughout offices in Marlton, Pittsburgh and Florida.

Singh got the idea to start the company after learning there were more than 400 nuclear power plants in the United States. He says there was a clear need for more waste-containment facilities. Although the number of nuclear plants in the United States hasn’t changed much since then, Singh says the need for safe storage continues.

“The fuel from the nuclear reactors had to be stored someplace,” he says. “Whatever success we have had has been because we are a technology innovator in tune to the needs of the marketplace.”

With that in mind, Singh and three others formed Holtec and started looking for work. The company’s first big contract—for $10 million—came in the early 1990s when it was selected by the Taiwan Power Co. to contain used nuclear fuel underwater in egg-crate storage racks, Singh says. Since that time, Singh says Holtec has improved its technology.

The company landed another big contract March of 2001 when the the Trojan Nuclear Plant in Oregon shut down rather than spend millions to repair a steam generator. Competing against larger companies, Holtec landed the $34 million job to make containers to store Trojan’s remaining nuclear waste.

Originally, Holtec’s business was predominantly in wet storage, in which containers of radioactive material are stored in 40 feet of water. Now, says Agace, the company primarily sets up dry-storage systems as it did at Hope Creek and will be doing a half a world away.

Warehousing atomic material may be good business for Holtec, but it is still controversial. “There are really no safe storage options for nuclear waste,” says Suzanne Leta, an advocate with New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, “but you have to do something with what you have.”

Leta says the dry casks are “generally more secure and robust” than underwater storage methods because of the construction methods and materials used in them.

But, any method of storing nuclear waste is a concern. “The reality that we are facing is that there are a lot of problems associated with nuclear power in general,” she says, “and one of them is the storage of waste.”

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