Culham based UKAEA awards £3 million nuclear robotics contract

Published by

Nicky Godding

The UK Atomic Energy Authority has awarded Harwell Campus-based Veolia Nuclear Solutions (UK) and Wälischmiller Engineering GmbH separate contracts totalling £3 million to supply robotic manipulator arms to its RACE research facility at Culham in Oxfordshire.

The £3 million contract stems from the £12 million UK-Japanese robotics deal for fusion energy and nuclear decommissioning research, called “LongOps”, announced in January this year.

LongOps will support the delivery of faster and safer decommissioning at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (“TEPCO”) Fukushima Dai-ichi site in Japan and at Sellafield in the UK.

Veolia Nuclear Solutions (UK) and Wälischmiller Engineering GmbH will each provide a twin-arm haptic manipulator – a form of kinaesthetic communications technology, complete with electrical and control systems, to deliver key aspects of the LongOps project. The manipulators will also be used by UKAEA to train operators that are based at both Sellafield and Fukushima.

In addition, developments from LongOps will be applied to the upgrading, maintenance and dismantling of fusion devices, such as the Joint European Torus (“JET”).

The four-year LongOps collaboration is led by UKAEA’s Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (“RACE”) robotics test facility at Culham Science Centre near Oxford.

LongOps is funded equally by UK Research and Innovation (“UKRI”), the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (“NDA”) and TEPCO.

Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe. After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts. She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.