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ROBOTICS & REMOTE TECHNOLOGY | RADWASTE


Clearing compartment 5


Cavendish Nuclear and Sellafield have embraced robots in handling legacy intermediate level waste at the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo


WHEN CALDER HALL, THE ORIGINAL Magnox CO2


Taken from a recent KUKA Whitepaper on nuclear power


-cooled


reactor, was built on the UK’s Cumbrian coast in the 1950s, industrial automation was in its infancy, computerisation was almost non-existent outside universities and robotics was the stuff of science fiction stories. A great deal has changed over the subsequent seven decades. An area of the Sellafield site is given over to the storage


of waste from the earlier days of nuclear power generation, including material from Calder Hall. Officially opened by the Queen in 1957, Calder Hall began commercial electricity generation in 1959, with an expected life of 30 years; it was shut down for the last time on 31 March 2003. Sellafield extends to 265 hectares. It hosts 200 nuclear


facilities and more than 1000 buildings altogether. Over 9000 people work there, making it the largest nuclear site in Europe. It has the most diverse range of nuclear activities of any single location in the world.


Its main activities now include nuclear fuel reprocessing,


waste storage and decommissioning. The estimated lifetime costs of the Sellafield decommissioning programme are currently estimated at around £70bn. The programme is scheduled for completion in the 2120s. Defueling operations at Calder Hall were completed


in 2019. Its four reactor buildings have since been placed into a ‘care and maintenance regime’, pending final decommissioning and demolition. While safety has always been a priority in construction and operation of all the activities at the Sellafield facility, past understanding of what would be needed for management in the future was neither as clear nor as detailed as now. The Pile Fuel Cladding Silo (PFCS), which was built in the 1950s, was filled over several decades primarily with aluminium fuel cladding, which was stripped from fuel rods


30 | August 2021 | www.neimagazine.com


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