December 21, 2015

Experts Discuss Use of Robots in Nuclear Cleanup Programs

By ExchangeMonitor

The Savannah River Site (SRS) recently hosted a gathering of robotics specialists from the United States and abroad for talks on the use of the technology in the Department of Energy’s nuclear site cleanup activities.

The event was co-organized by the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM), the National Science Foundation, and Purdue University. It featured 44 engineers and scientists for a discussion of “Robotics for Handling High Consequence Materials,” according to an EM press release.

The DOE-EM Robotics Team, which features specialists from the office, other federal agencies, U.S. academic institutions, and Canada, India, Japan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, had previously traveled to the Hanford Site and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the U.S. and the Sellafield nuclear fuel and decommissioning site in the U.K.

The team focuses both on where robots are already being used in EM cleanup programs — underwater and underground, in the air, and in constrained spaces — and where they might be put to work going forward. During their visit, the specialists toured the Savannah River National Laboratory and several other facilities at SRS and heard about the lab’s work in developing tools and robot technology that can operate in “nuclear environments,” EM said.

“Advances in this field give the Department of Energy and EM the opportunity to perform our work even more safely and effectively,” EM Senior Technical Advisor Rodrigo Rimando said in the release.

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