Alpha Glovebox Decommissioning Feasibility Study

"Recent studies and demonstration of new cutting techniques have identified that deployment of robots with lasers for remote cutting operations could offer significant benefit and go some way to achieve the desired outcome of safer, faster and cheaper nuclear decommissioning. However, there still remains significant uncertainty over the capability, integration and use of the technology, therefore there is a need to design, integrate and demonstrate the system(s) to enable size reduction of alpha contaminated gloveboxes and other large alpha contaminated items.

This work will identify that laser cutting has real advantages over manual size reduction methods with the use of remote AI technologies.

The robot laser cutting system with 7th axis control would consist of a manipulator arm type robot suspended from a movable track/crane/gantry. The robot would be a standard industrial robot -- for example, one from the KUKA KR series -- mounted underneath a movable platform. This platform would in turn be attached to a gantry crane (or similar) above a facility where the system was required. This would effectively allow the robot to be lowered in to the facility from above to perform manipulation tasks.

The system needs to have an additional positional system for the platform being deployed. This would enable the position of the platform relative to some home position to be known at any given time. The robot would be programmed to know the position of its end effector relative to its base - which for this system would be the platform suspended from the gantry. Similarly, any tools would know positional data relative to the robots end effector. Thus, by applying the appropriate linear transforms from the home position, it should be possible to work out the exact position of the tool relative to the home position of the gantry. This would allow high accuracy operations to be performed by the robot in the facility. These might include high accuracy scans of a facility (using a point cloud scanning device), manipulation of items in the facility, size reduction, etc - any items which might otherwise be performed by a conventional facility with a stationary robot.

The key aspects to success will be through the systematic project management ensuring:

• Engineering design

• Technology integration

• Date fusion and data analytics

• Software development

• Laser and Fume management developments

The output of the project will be a full feasibility study of the system."