Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to invest £9.5m in autonomous radioactive waste sorting project
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is to invest £9.5million over four years in a pioneering partnership that will see innovative technology used to remotely and autonomously sort and segregate radioactive waste.
The so-called Auto-SAS project - which is a collaboration with Nuclear Restoration Services (NRS), Sellafield and Nuclear Waste Services (NWS) - will be delivered jointly by AtkinsRéalis and Createc, working in partnership as ARCTEC.
Manual segregation of radioactive waste is complex and hazardous due to the nature of the material, so caution is exercised and where waste is mixed it’s currently all categorised as Intermediate Level Waste (ILW) or Plutonium Contaminated Material (PCM) rather than being sorted by type or radioactivity. Using robotics provides the ability to use technology to more accurately categorise the waste, avoiding using more costly waste routes when they aren’t required, while also removing people from hazardous environments and giving them the opportunity to develop new skills.
Using robotics to autonomously sort and categorise waste and has the potential to save hundreds of millions of pounds in waste storage and disposal costs
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