Integrated Innovation for Nuclear Decommissioning (IIND)

Project Description and Services Provided

Integrated Innovation for Nuclear Decommissioning (IIND) was launched in 2017 by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), an international competition to develop Safer, Faster and Better Value decommissioning of legacy nuclear facilities. IIND was ran as an R&D project to provide a demonstrator of innovative solutions for the end-to-end nuclear decommissioning challenge. The competition had four phases: (1) a feasibility study, (2) an inactive demonstration, (3) a delivery plan and (4) an active demonstration. Amentum won phases 1 and 2 of the competition developing an innovative modular robotic toolkit of reconfigurable systems. This contrasted with the common approach of a Swiss-army-knife style monolithic robot system. The final phase was cancelled within the first year by the client due to budgetary issues.

Amentum led a consortium of 9 partners for the project, where Amentum provided:

• The vision of the innovative solution, project management and technical lead.
• Design, manufacturing and commissioning of a test rig with a 1.4t vessel and a system to release it.
• An innovative solution to bring waste down to ground in a controlled manner using inflatables.
• Development of a modular robotics toolkit and integration of systems.
• Robotics simulations for development, testing and operations planning.
• A data and task management system based on web interfaces, called Sixth Sense, which has gone on to be used on other projects.
• A prototype of a through wall deployment system and a further concept design.

Challenges

Nuclear Decommissioning is a high cost, high risk, and a long duration challenge. IIND was launched as a competition by the NDA to accelerate innovation and provide a real test environment to develop Safer, Faster and Better Value decommissioning technologies.

It focussed on a reprocessing cell scenario at Sellafield to stimulate the formation of consortia to offer new ways to decommission legacy radioactive process cells. Nuclear reprocessing cells contain complex chemical process plant, and they were designed without access in mind due to the radiochemical hazards they contained, not even lighting was installed. Ancillary walkways and access platforms were often removed during construction, requiring decommissioning operators to work from height on scaffolds. The cell condition is often uncertain, and the radiological risks unknown.

The challenge and scope of the competition was to provide an end-to-end decommissioning system. Amentum presented a three-stage process consisting of survey and planning, de-plant operations in cell, and waste characterisation, sorting and packing.

Solutions and Outcome

The solution consisted of a three-stage process. The first stage was to survey the cell. Manual characterisation and off-line post processing brings risks to both the operators and samples and creates delays to planning. To reduce these risks and delays it was identified that by remotely deploying robots with integrated sensors, we could offer in-situ characterisation in real time. This provided the benefit of allowing more agile and adaptive planning and project execution.

The survey stage of the project focused on three sensors; a stereo camera provided the geometry with live 3D point cloud data. Radiological data came from a Compton gamma camera, live post-processing while querying the data allowed an overlay visualisation by energy bands to show location of radiation. Multiple measurements at different positions provided a 3D volumetric view. Chemical data was also captured using a standoff Raman Spectrometer and provided a spectrum and a list of chemical compounds likelihoods in a point measure.

These sensors were digitised and integrated to the robotics control system providing the data feeds directly to the rest of the system, for live visualisation and data storage.

The second stage consisted in removing plant from the cell and lowering waste from height using an innovative pneumatic support system made of remotely controlled spherical inflatables. These created a cellular structure, tolerant to failure of individual elements.

And the third stage, using a gantry robot with onboard tools, including a laser cutter and gripper, it would perform further size reduction and characterise the waste to finally sort and pack it based on contamination level.