COVER STORY | SIMULATION AND REMOTE WORKING
Simulators and waste handling
The Pile Fuel Cladding Silo Operational Simulator deployed at the UK’s complex Sellafield site is proving the value of collaboration and simulation for challenging radioactive environments and is paving the way for deployment of more robots in future.
By Varun Kumar, Team Lead and Senior Robotics Engineer, at RAICo; Jack Waddington, Robotics Equipment Engineer and Idris Hussain, Robotics Equipment Programme Lead, at Sellafield Ltd.
ROBOTS HAVE AN OBVIOUS ROLE to play in radioactive environments on nuclear decommissioning sites. They can handle radioactive materials or perform other activities in places that are hazardous for humans to enter, or where humans can only do so with significant protection. However, robots are not always the completely ‘hands off’ solution one might think. Sometimes their human programmers need to enter the active environment, under strict safety protocols, to make upgrades to processes related to their software, or to set new paths. This requires those programmers to don an air-fed suit, with two sets of gloves and a respirator, so they can enter the cell and work on the robot. It’s uncomfortable, costly, and not without risk. Solutions to this problem are arising in the form of
simulators – highly accurate virtual representations of the robot’s environment. These provide a safe ‘sandbox’ environment on which new setups and paths can be trialled without risk, with optimal settings then transferred to the robot’s controller. That could save days of time in robot upgrades, reduce discomfort and radiation exposure risk, support robot operator training, and dramatically cut the cost associated with humans entering a contaminated cell.
A Pioneering robot simulation at Sellafield The first such simulator being deployed at Sellafield is the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo Operational Simulator (PFCS OpSim), developed with Sellafield Ltd by a team at the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Collaboration (RAICo) – a collaboration between the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), Sellafield Ltd, the University of Manchester and more recently AWE Nuclear Security Technologies. The simulator is of a Waste Container Handling Facility (WCHF), a concrete room where robots process waste containers. This is housed within Sellafield’s Pile Fuel Cladding Silo, a legacy waste storage facility and priority for decommissioning on the site, built in the 1950s to store radioactive cladding from the nuclear fuel used by the very first reactors on the Sellafield site. Today, it is one of the most hazardous facilities on the site and needs to be emptied so the waste can be repackaged into safe, modern storage.
Within the WCHF is a large 6-axis industrial robot arm, which unbolts empty containers, sends them to be filled with waste, then securely bolts the returning containers
Above: Sellafield’s Pile Fuel Cladding Silo is a legacy waste storage facility and one of the most hazardous facilities on the site
32 | September 2025 |
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