Integrated Innovation in Nuclear Decommissioning (IIND)

Project

IIND competition

Benefits

The innovative products and new technologies developed through this Active Demonstrator could provide major cost savings in future decommissioning activities by reducing uncertainty, enabling greater transferability (plug and play) and developing spin-out technologies and systems to address other challenges across the Sellafield site and NDA estate. This approach maximises collaboration between academics, SMEs, and larger organisations, while also encouraging technology transfer from other sectors.

Current Status

BIDS vehicle is undergoing final manufacture and testing while the deployment cell modifications are being completed, with active demonstration trials planned for late 2022.

Delivery Partners

Barrnon, NDA, Innovate UK

Contact Details

David Procter

technical.innovation@sellafieldsites.com

The IIND competition was launched in early 2017, with the objective of encouraging the supply chain to innovate, collaborate and transfer cross-sector technologies into the nuclear market to solve a ‘grand challenge’.

Learning from previous innovation competitions, we were requested to steer the scope of the competition by identifying, specifying and bringing to life a decommissioning challenge which was timely, complex and diverse, with significant opportunity for a step change where Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI) could be part of the solution.

The end-to-end decommissioning of reprocessing cells was selected as the ‘challenge statement’ to focus the competition. The aspiration was for a transferable, integrated decommissioning toolkit that minimises the interface between the operator and the hazard, whilst aspiring for a ten-fold increase in productivity and reduction in lifecycle cost.

The IIND competition sought integrated systems which were scalable and transferable and would ultimately lead to safer, faster, better value decommissioning for the future. The competition is now in the third phase and working towards Active Demonstration on the Sellafield site. Initially two consortia were chosen to go forward into Phase 3 but now only one remains.

The Barrnon Integrated Decommissioning System (BIDS) uses a ‘Swiss army knife’ approach comprising two Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs): a large base vehicle with the ability to carry out a wide range of characterisation and size reduction operations on the ground and reaching up into the cell using a long-reach telescopic boom. The main ROV is supported by a smaller Waste Transfer Vehicle (WTV) that will be used to collect and transfer size-reduced waste items from within the cell to the waste export area.

The Barrnon BIDS vehicle is manufactured, and a number of the sub-assemblies are undergoing works testing, while the Barrnon WTV is partially manufactured and the potential to make the vehicle battery operated/umbilical-free is being explored. Characterisation, design specification and modification of the deployment cell is almost complete prior to the active demonstration trials.