UK to tackle nuclear waste with robots and AI

Launched in 2018, the NCNR is a consortium of eight universities led by the University of Birmingham and backed by £42m of funding. Its primary mission is to develop robotic solutions that can characterise, handle and decommission the huge amounts of waste generated by the nuclear industry over the past since the early 1950s.

Using current technology, the clean-up would take 120 years and an estimated one million human entries into contaminated zones, with a cost of approximately £234bn. According to the NCNR, developing robots capable of taking up the task is a necessity for a number of reasons.

“There’s a large amount of radioactive waste that humans can’t go near at all,” Prof Rustam Stolkin, co-director of the NCNR, told a press event at the Royal Institution. “And where we have technology that’s now becoming capable to do the complex things that human workers do, we have an ethical and moral obligation to stop using humans in those roles. We don’t send Victorian children up chimneys any more. It’s not socially acceptable.”