Westinghouse said the three-year agreement includes options up to six years and is valued up to $100m.
The two research reactors are the nuclear fuel and materials testing reactor at Halden and the Jeep II neutron scattering facility at Kjeller. They were permanently shut down in June 2018 and April 2019 respectively.
Ownership of both facilities and responsibility for them will move to NND, a government agency, from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE), the research company that operated both reactors.
“The decommissioning of the nuclear facilities in Norway is a complicated assignment and NND welcomes the international decommissioning experience that Westinghouse brings to this project.” said NND’s Nils Bøhmer.
Norway has never had any commercial nuclear power stations, but has had four research reactors. Two of those reactors, Nora and Jeep I, have already been decommissioned.
In 2020 reports in Norway said preliminary calculations showed that it could cost around 21 billion kroner (€2bn, $2.1bn) to deal with nuclear waste after the shutdown of the country’s nuclear facilities, with the task taking 50-60 years.
Press reports quoted the government as saying facilities such as landfills and storage must be built and some of the spent fuel from the reactors may have to be treated abroad before it can be disposed of.
