Glos & Oxon companies secure radioactive waste contracts

Published by

Nicky Godding

Companies from across the region have been awarded contracts to come up with innovative approaches to remotely sort and segregate radioactive waste.

The ‘Sort and Seg’ innovation competition, worth £3.9 million in total, was launched in July 2020. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) - in partnership with Berkeley, Gloucestershire-based Magnox Ltd, Sellafield Ltd in Cumbria and Innovate UK - set the challenge of coming up with proposals for using autonomous technology to sort and segregate mixed radioactive wastes at the UK’s oldest nuclear sites.

Companies across the region securing contracts include AN Technology in Wallingford, Cavendish Nuclear in Berkeley,,Veolia Nuclear Solutions Ltd and Chilton Computing, both based at Didcot in Oxfordshire.

Magnox is responsible for defuelling and decommissioning 12 nuclear sites and operating one hydro-electric plant in the UK.

The first phase of the competition is now complete and contracts, worth up to £60k each, have been awarded to 14 consortia that will now come up with feasibility studies for their proposals, including robotics, advanced sensors and artificial intelligence.

The NDA’s Head of Innovation, Sara Huntingdon, said: "The reaction to ‘Sort and Seg’ has been incredible – we have received the best response we’ve ever had for this kind competition.

"It’s really exciting that most of the successful organisations are bringing in experience and ideas from other sectors and I’m really looking forward to working together with our partners and with all the winners to see how these ideas develop."

The initial feasibility studies will be delivered in May, with the winners competing for a number of contracts - each worth up to £900,000 - for 15-month ‘demonstrator projects’.

The full list of successful companies is below:

AB5 Consulting Ltd
Jacobs Clean Energy Ltd
A.N. Technology Ltd
Atkins Ltd
Barrnon Ltd
Cavendish Nuclear Ltd
Chilton Computing Ltd
Create Technologies Ltd
Delkia Ltd
EDF Energy R&D Centre Ltd
Forth Engineering (Cumbria) Ltd
Nuvia Ltd
Red Marine Engineering Ltd
Veolia Nuclear Solutions Ltd

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.