Cleaning up a nuclear site currently means sending samples to a lab at a cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds per batch—and sometimes the radiation is too high for anyone to get a sample at all. This project tackles a practical bottleneck in nuclear decommissioning. Existing remote tools like gamma detectors and laser scanners each answer one question—what isotope is present, what the surface looks like, what elements are in the material—but no single tool gives the full picture needed to decide whether waste can be safely segregated, stored, or disposed of. Without that total picture, operators must either take expensive samples or leave material in place, slowing clean-up and driving up costs. The team will combine multiple sensing technologies into a single robotic platform, similar in concept to NASA’s Curiosity rover, that can enter high-radiation zones and build a complete, spatially mapped characterisation of the environment in real time. If successful, the system could be trialled at Sellafield and Fukushima, offering a cheaper, safer, and faster route to decommissioning—a quiet but critical part of keeping the nuclear energy option viable for the UK’s low-carbon future.
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The future use of nuclear energy in the UK and internationally is very much dependent on the ability to characterise the various highly radioactive environments that occur in the nuclear industry for both efficient decontamination and decommissioning as well as in the design of new nuclear fission reactors as well as fusion reactors. Currently, site and material characterisation is costly and time consuming because remote methods for the environmental, chemical and geoscientific characterisation of man-made and natural materials, specifically designed for the nuclear arena, are limited. The inaccessible, complex and confined nature of these often high-radioactivity environments can preclude traditional field-based data collection techniques, which are often focused on sample collection and off-site analysis. With costs entering the tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds for sample analysis in a particular plant, and the possibility that access is so restricted that obtaining samples may actually be impossible, remote in-situ analysis prior to segregation may offer a cheaper, safer, quicker and thus far more attractive solution. On their own, current in-situ techniques (e.g. gamma spectroscopy, 3D laser scanning, elemental composition through laser induced breakdown spectroscopy), each answer a particular characterisation question, but on their own only provide a component of the full characterisation picture that is required for instance for waste segregation. This project aims to combine such technologies into an integrated system, with each technology contributing in real-time to form a seamless jigsaw - a 'total characterisation' picture - setting characterised materials into the spatial context of the environment they are located in. Advanced robotics and control technologies will be used in a similar way to NASA's Curiosity Rover to form the flexible platform necessary for the trials in a range of nuclear environments from Sellafield in the UK to Fukushima in Japan.
Barry Lennox (Co-Investigator)Malcolm Joyce (Co-Investigator)Michael Aspinall (Co-Investigator)Nicholas Smith (Co-Investigator)Philip A Martin (Principal Investigator)
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