IRVINE, CA, June 2, 2011 -- Nuclear waste management company Kurion has completed the initial delivery of several hundred tons of equipment and media to support the cleanup of contaminated water at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Over the next couple of weeks, Kurion engineers will facilitate system installation and commissioning, with a startup targeted for mid-June.

The larger contaminated water processing system at the Fukushima plant comprises several stages including debris and oil removal, radioactivity removal (Kurion's role), and desalinization. The goal is to process the radioactive contaminated water in the turbine buildings, along with new cooling water added daily, and return the purified water to the plant for recycle as reactor cooling water. As an added precaution, a second radioactivity removal system is being developed and delivered by Areva of France.

Kurion CEO John Raymont said: "The Kurion system was designed and fabricated on a 24-hour/day, 7 day per week basis with many redesigns as the customer's specifications were modified repeatedly as new data was learned from the damaged plant."

Kurion Vice President and Project Director Richard Keenan said: "The design goals were for a system that would be reliable, isotope removal flexible by being able to adjust media combinations, based on lessons learned from Three Mile Island, U.S. DOE operations, and nuclear plant operations world-wide, and based on industry standard demineralization processing technology utilizing Kurion's extraordinary Ion Specific Media."

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