Close relationships between companies and government have recently been aired widely in the public arena and rightly condemned as intolerable. Australian financier Les Greensill ran a company offering supply chain finance for “future and prospective receivables” (such as Bluestone metallurgical coal company in the US) and had insinuated himself into the upper echelons of UK government. That is a big deal – a big corrupt deal. But there is a far bigger deal going on between business interests and UK government that remains hidden in plain sight. It’s a far bigger corrupt and uniquely dangerous deal involving a Cumbrian coal mine, high level nuclear waste plans and the highest and most powerful tier of government. It seems to the nuclear safety campaigners, Radiation Free Lakeland, who were the first to challenge the ridiculous PR of the “green steel” “carbon neutral” Cumbria coal mine that UK government are more than happy to be accused from all quarters of climate hypocrisy. The cronyism surrounding plans to deliver the UKs biggest Critical National Infrastructure project namely a deep nuclear dump has been buried deep and continues without a shred of scrutiny or even a raised eyebrow.

Radiation Free Lakeland 28th April 2021 read more »

A Scottish university will help create robotic technologies for bomb disposal and nuclear decommissioning jobs, taking humans out of harm’s way. Heriot-Watt University’s National Robotarium is working on the project with Sheffield-based robotics software firm Cyberselves and Resolve Robotics, of Cumbria. The project, called Tel-Subsea, is one of eleven in an £800,000 programme managed by the Defence and Security Accelerator (Dasa),

Energy Voice 23rd April 2021 read more »

Heriot-Watt’s role tackling underwater bombs and nuclear material. A leading robotics research centre at an Edinburgh university has been awarded funding to develop technology for underwater bomb disposal and dismantling nuclear material.

Edinburgh Evening News 23rd April 2021 read more »

The UK Atomic Energy Authority (“UKAEA”) has awarded Veolia Nuclear Solutions (UK) and Wälischmiller Engineering GmbH separate contracts totalling £3 million to supply robotic manipulator arms to its RACE research facility. The £3M contract stems from the £12M 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.

UKAEA 20th April 2021 read more »

Eureka 20th April 2021 read more »

Cavendish Nuclear is leading a project to employ advanced robotic technology for safer, quicker and more economical sorting of nuclear waste material. OptiSORT aims to improve productivity by introducing autonomous operation in remote sorting and segregation projects like the Berkeley Active Waste Vaults Retrieval Programme. Babcock subsidiary Cavendish Nuclear has won funding for its new OptiSORT system, which will be carried as part of an industry-wide partnership that includes Bristol Robotics Laboratory. UK to tackle nuclear waste with robots and AI. The funding forms Phase 1 of a 2-part competition awarded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), in partnership with Innovate UK, to fund innovative ideas that will lead to better ways of sorting and segregating radioactive waste. In a statement, Tony Burnett, head of Innovation and Technology for Cavendish Nuclear said, “The use of this technology will be brand new and is not something currently carried out on nuclear sites.” Along with Bristol Robotics, the OptiSORT partnership includes Clifton Photonics Ltd, Imitec Ltd, Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics, Structure Vision Ltd and Acrovision Ltd.

Engineer 19th April 2021 read more »

Nuclear waste has been an intractable problem ever since nuclear power was developed over 60 years ago. It has become a very expensive and politically embarrassing issue all around the world. Not that the Johnson Government would admit this. Many in it still argue that nuclear power is the answer to climate change, conveniently forgetting that they are passing the waste buck onto future generations. To those in power, the solution to the waste problem is always just around the corner, to be resolved just beyond their term of office. But the history of nuclear over the last six decades, across the globe, is of dozens of failed schemes. Currently the UK is undertaking its sixth search in 42 years for a nuclear waste dump site. Yet again wrestling with the problem of years of public consultations, planning inquiries and geological investigations, only to be finally rejected, even as scientists warn that continued neglect of the issue is placing citizens in increasing danger. The problem is that civil nuclear industries, especially when, as in Britain, they are combined with a weapons programme, produce plutonium and other by-products in spent fuel that take as long as 100,000 years to decay. International law requires the country that produced the waste to dispose of it within its own boundaries. Identifying somewhere to put this waste, where they could be safe for that length of time, requires stable geological formations that are very hard to find anywhere.

Electrical Review 14th April 2021 read more »