UK looks to robots to assist in waste management tasks

Friday, 27 June 2025

The project - Auto-SAS - will be delivered jointly by AtkinsRéalis and Createc, working in partnership as ARCTEC to combine their joint experience and track record of developing automated systems and robotics in nuclear. The two companies will take learning from the solutions they developed in an earlier innovation competition to develop a system which will be deployed on the former Oldbury nuclear power plant site.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has committed to invest up to GBP9.5 million (USD13 million) in the project over four years, which is a collaboration with Nuclear Restoration Services, Sellafield Ltd and Nuclear Waste Services.

"The NDA and its operating companies recognise that robotics and automation have a key role to play in reducing the time, cost and risk associated with our decommissioning mission," the organisation said. "Auto-SAS aims to push the boundaries of robotic systems in the NDA group, acting as a stepping-stone to the routine use of autonomous systems and continuous operations."

Manual segregation of radioactive waste is complex and hazardous due to the nature of the material, so caution is exercised and where waste is mixed it is currently all categorised as intermediate-level waste or plutonium-contaminated material, rather than being sorted by type or radioactivity.

Using robotics provides the ability to use technology to more accurately categorise the waste, avoiding using more costly waste routes when they are not required, while also removing people from hazardous environments and giving them the opportunity to develop new skills.

The ARCTEC system will use a combination of sensors to categorise the waste before robotic manipulators grasp and consign waste items to the most appropriate waste route.

Auto-SAS will initially be deployed on the Oldbury site and will be used to separate low-level waste from intermediate-level waste which has been retrieved from the vaults on site - created when the power station was operational.

The project is being undertaken in two phases. Phase 1 runs from June 2025 to August 2027 and will deliver a fully operational system in an inactive environment. Phase 2 will deliver an active demonstration of the system at Oldbury.

NDA said the aim is to transfer learning to support future deployments at other NDA group sites, for example Sellafield.

"This is a hugely exciting project for us, using robotics to autonomously sort and categorise waste, and has the potential to save hundreds of millions of pounds in waste storage and disposal costs," said NDA Chief R&D Officer Melanie Brownridge. "It's a great example of collaboration across the NDA group and supply chain to develop transformative solutions to decommissioning challenges which enable us to deliver our mission safely and efficiently."