FUSION AND DIGITAL ENDEAVOURS | SPECIAL REPORT
Above: UKAEA’s Culham has to take the same digital leap as the rest of the power sector
Disruption or innovation Buckingham is executive director at UKAEA and he heads the robotics division, RACE (Remote Applications in Challenging Environments). He is also now responsible for JET Decommissioning and Repurposing. Talking about the organisation’s open call, Buckingham
quickly opens up the definition of ‘disruption’. He says, “People love innovation, and they don’t like disruption. But of course they are the same thing. Innovation causes disruption.” He is looking for change that can be tested and scaled up and that “will disrupt the way we do things”. Talking about gearing up to decommission JET Buckingham notes that there are many sectors that will require complex decommissioning processes, whether they are under the sea, in space or onshore assets that are inaccessible, such as nuclear reactors. He says dealing with those externalities should be part of the engineer’s job from the start. His organisation works closely with the Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is tasked by the government to clean-up the UK’s 17 earliest nuclear sites, but UKAEA’s focus on fusion gives it different challenge. He says, “We know from nature you never get something completely free… there are always consequences and we should have our eyes open.” The fuel for JET and its successors is deuterium and tritium; the tritium is radioactive and as it migrates “we end up with tritiated materials. How we manage that and extract the tritium is really important. Then there are other materials activated by the neutrons from fusion. None are long-lived but they have to be managed.” Management is not just disposal: it includes reducing the hazardous waste elements, reuse and recycling. Part of innovation and disruption – and UKAEA’s call
to the market – is learning from other industries. To lay the foundation for this, Buckingham explains that a huge amount of effort went into demonstrating to the UK government that fusion is different from the fission industry, with different hazards, so that, rather than being regulated by the Office for Nuclear Regulation, it could be
overseen by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and Environment Agency (EA) – regulators familiar to other industries. That argument made, the risks and hazards of the industry can largely be considered in a similar way to other industries. “That gives you a chance to learn from other people” and
prompts new ways of looking at the problem, Buckingham says. For example, “There is an interesting question as to whether it [fusion] is a process industry that has radioactive waste or the opposite. Your starting point in the approach to dealing with waste is important.” He has taken on the responsibility of JET
Decommissioning and Repurposing because of this opportunity and because it is “the first opportunity to look at decommissioning a fusion power plant for a long time and the first one for another 50 years or so, so it is a really important learning opportunity. So rather than thinking of just getting rid of it, let’s do some thinking about what technologies are out there in this industry and what we can do”.
The digital future As noted above, JET is moving into the decommissioning phase at a time when many companies – including those in the energy sector – are taking advantage of new digital opportunities to build ‘digital twins’ of their assets. Buckingham details some of the opportunities and benefits of such digital twins. They enable planning and strategy, because the virtual environment allows you to share a view of the world. They provide a platform which allows for faster training, testing and decision-making and for planning and rehearsing specific operations, “Because you are not limited to hardware”. And with all the data available within the digital environment that allow an asset owner and operator to ‘scroll back’ what happened in the past and ‘scroll forward’ to imagine and test potential procedures or strategies. Talking about using these digital tools at UKAEA, Buckingham says, “JET has always had good models of the inside of the reactor and used them to plan. We can
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