Veolia Nuclear Solutions has won the 2019 Queen’s award

Veolia Nuclear Solutions in the UK has received the Queen’s Award for International Trade for Outstanding Short Term Growth in overseas sales over the last three years for the second time. It recognises Veolia Nuclear Solutions’ achievements in the nuclear field, in the UK and abroad.

The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise are the most prestigious awards for UK business, designed to recognise and encourage outstanding achievements in the fields of Innovation, International Trade, Sustainable Development and Promoting Opportunity. The Queen’s Awards scheme was instituted by Royal Warrant in 1965 and the first Awards were made in 1966. This year, 201 UK businesses have been recognised for their contribution to international trade, innovation, sustainable development and promoting opportunity.

There are four categories:

International Trade

Innovation

Sustainable Development

Promoting Opportunity

The International Trade category, an award for our commitment worldwide

The International Trade category is dedicated to companies that have demonstrated that their business has achieved substantial growth in overseas earnings and commercial success through either outstanding achievement over 3 years or continuous achievement over 6 years. With this award, Veolia Nuclear Solutions will join more than 6,000 UK businesses that have received a Queen’s Award, a strong added-value. According to research from the University of Strathclyde, 73% of previous winners have attributed the award to achieving increased recognition and international sales.

Veolia Nuclear Solutions, a world class player in the UK and abroad

Veolia Nuclear Solutions is involved in many projects worldwide. Veolia Nuclear Solutions in the UK is working on two major overseas projects. The company has been supporting ITER Fusion project, currently being built in France with remote handling expertise for a number of years. More recently, the company has started working in close collaboration with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan on the design and construction of a unique, remotely controlled, boom-type robotic arm system to investigate the nature and location of nuclear fuel debris in the Unit 2 Reactor at the disabled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The proposed solution, combining knowledge and experience gained through its work in the nuclear fusion sector and demanding environments in the UK at Dounreay and Sellafield, is being delivered in four phases: outline design, detailed design, manufacture and finally assembly and test. Similar technology approaches are being developed to look at sampling and ultimate retrieval of fuel debris from what is seen as the most challenging decommissioning project in the world. Since technology and science at this level cross national boundaries, the geographic location of projects and the multinational nature of customers and working teams is no barrier to our participation, as is amply demonstrated by the fact that, in addition to work in the UK, France and Japan, Veolia Nuclear Solutions in the UK have relationships with organisations located in Belgium, Canada, Spain, Italy, Finland, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Outstanding Short Term Growth in overseas sales

Since winning the International Trade Award in 2014, Veolia Nuclear Solutions in the UK  overseas sales have continued to grow extensively. Within the last three years they have managed to secure new contracts and overseas sales have grown by 469% and the percentage exported has also risen from 27% to 84%. Their main international markets are Japan and France.

We were among the first responders to assist TEPCO in the Fukushima tsunami recovery. To date, our technology has been used to remove more than 3.7E17 Bq (10 million curies) of Cesium from more than 370,000 m3 (about 100 million gallons) of aqueous waste. We have also deployed a mobile technology platform to remove Strontium from water held in hundreds of storage tanks on the site. At the reactors themselves, our Remote Access technologies are used to inspect and repair reactor containments.
At Sellafield, Veolia Nuclear Solution developed a project to design tooling and perform trials to test the remote removal of fuel and isotope materials from the Pile 1 reactor at the Windscale facility.