Nuclear decommissioningPipe-crawling robot to help decommission nuclear facility
A pair of autonomous robots will soon drive through miles of pipes at the U.S. Department of Energy’s former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, to identify uranium deposits on pipe walls. Shuttered since 2000, the plant began operations in 1954 and produced enriched uranium, including weapons-grade uranium. With 10.6 million square feet of floor space, it is DOE’s largest facility under roof — the size of 158 football fields, with 75 miles of process pipe.
A pair of autonomous robots developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute will soon drive through miles of pipes at the U.S. Department of Energy’s former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, to identify uranium deposits on pipe walls.
The CMU robot has demonstrated it can measure radiation levels more accurately from inside the pipe than is possible with external techniques. In addition to savings in labor costs, its use significantly reduces hazards to workers who otherwise must perform external measurements by hand, garbed in protective gear and using lifts or scaffolding to reach elevated pipes.
DOE officials estimate the robots could save tens of millions of dollars in completing the characterization of uranium deposits at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, and perhaps another $50 million at a similar uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Ky.
“This will transform the way measurements of uranium deposits are made from now on,” said William “Red” Whittaker, robotics professor and director of the Field Robotics Center.
Senior Project Scientist Heather Jones will present two technical papers about the robot on Wednesday, March 21, at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix. CMU also will demonstrate a prototype of the robot during the conference.
CMU says that university is building two of the robots, called RadPiper, and will deliver the production prototype units to DOE’s sprawling 3,778-acre Portsmouth site in May. RadPiper employs a new “disc-collimated” radiation sensor invented at CMU. Led by Whittaker, the team began the project last year and worked closely with DOE and Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth — the decommissioning contractor — to build a prototype on a tight schedule and test it at Portsmouth last fall.
Shuttered since 2000, the plant began operations in 1954 and produced enriched uranium, including weapons-grade uranium. With 10.6 million square feet of floor space, it is DOE’s largest facility under roof, with three large buildings containing enrichment process equipment that span the size of 158 football fields. The process buildings contain more than 75 miles of process pipe.
