Our background includes work in nuclear power, Department of Energy weapons facility decommissioning projects and Army Corps of Engineers Manhattan Project remediation efforts. We use our 40 years of nuclear experience to solve tough problems for our customers while maintaining a very high level of safety.
A large landfill company accidentally buried 2.5 million pounds of radioactive waste in a hazardous waste landfill that was not properly permitted to accept it. State regulators requested a full gamma survey of the 40 acre area, but due to the nature of the hazardous waste landfill traditional methods of GPS guided, walk-over surveys were not practical.
K2 successfully worked with scientists and engineers at Los Alamos to use a LIDAR guided drone equipped with a 3" NaI gamma detector to to perform a fly-over survey at a constant speed and predetermined height. The detailed 3D heat maps of gamma readings provided valuable information that eventually led to a decision to leave the waste in place and avoid an estimated $40 million dollar remediation.
K2 was asked to figure out a better way of cleaning E&P centralized impoundments. Our customer had (3) large CIs that they wanted cleaned to free up additional water volume. Liner integrity was a primary concern as the intent was to reuse these facilities.
The first CI was traditionally cleaned with workers wading in what amounted to be radioactive quicksand with spray wands and suction hoses. This approach exposes workers to high concentrations of TENORM (in this case ~1200 pCi/g) and is fraught with other industrial hazards (heat stress, slips, high pressure water etc).
After cleaning, an excess of 100 holes were found in the liner. The other (2) ponds were cleaned by K2 using a two man crew and remotely controlled dredge. The dredged material was processed with (2) large centrifuge units. The client estimated the waste volume to be well over 10,000 tons.
Using K2's approach, the ponds were cleaned in (24) working days with no worker entries, the waste was minimized to 186 tons and there were no rips in the liner.
K2 also has an innovative approach to AST sediment removal, wall/floor cleaning and surface preparation. Sediment is removed using a modified dredge. Tanks are accessed remotely from the top with no worker entry required. After the sediment is removed, K2 can use a remotely operated Ultra High Pressure/low volume water blasting equipment with a wall crawler cleaning head. The pump only uses 6 gpm and produces 40,000psi at the wall/floor crawling deployment heads. The wall crawler units are commonly used for ship hull cleaning, tank resurfacing and nuclear power plant reactor cavity decontamination.