Oiling the wheels of nuclear clean-up

Fifty years ago this month, a fire raged through Pile 1 of Windscale nuclear power station in Cumbria, sending a plume of radioactive material as far afield as London, Germany and Scandinavia.

Now a new robotic tool based on conventional hydraulic technology more familiar in oil exploration is playing a key role in the decommissioning process.

The

(UKAEA) is working with US automation company

and specialist decommissioning engineers C2HM Hill to return Windscale to a brownfield site.

Richard Roper, programme manager for the site, said: 'A new safety case was made in 2006 by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII). After an intrusive survey of the core, they found the state of the fuel was fine and the risk of criticality or explosion was not credible, and decided to accelerate the decommissioning process and reduce the cost.'

Unlike modern power plants, Windscale was not designed for decommissioning, so a great deal of site preparation and characterisation of the damaged fuel needs to be carried out before work starts.