Nuclear Workers To Use 20m Tool

A 16-piece apparatus dubbed the world's many complex Swiss Army blade is to help idle the Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR) in Caithness.

The device cost 20m to pattern and erect and will run in rarely hot conditions inside Dounreay's turning point Dome.

Its detachable apparatus pieces cost 100,000 any and import between 37-93kg.

They will cut and squeeze 977 steel rods once used to "breed" plutonium from uranium.

Measuring about 2.5m (8ft) in length, the rods resemble gaunt sections of scaffolding.

UK supervision agency, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), has draft transporting the metal, that is well known as breeder material, by sight to Sellafield in Cumbria to be reprocessed.

The new 4m (14ft) long device has been changed in to location on top of the DFR's reactor vessel, ready to be lowered in to the dark of the reactor vessel where it will "harvest" the steel rods.

Before this work can start, a glass steel will have to be emptied from the vessel over the next 12 months.

The apparatus is moreover being put by a array of "robust" tests and its operators are reception training.

Once in place, the device will run in rarely hot conditions and in a nitrogen atmosphere. Nitrogen prevents any remains of the glass steel from reacting.

Exposure to H2O or oxygen would result in the steel to grasp fire.

Alex Potts, the operative in assign of the Dounreay Site Restoration Limited (DSRL) project, mentioned it was as well dangerous for people to work inside the reactor vessel.

He said: "The reactor was a one-off pattern and so is the apparatus you must be take out the breeder rods.

"It's as well poisonous in there for any person to do the job manually - the deviation levels are still really high and the residual traces of glass steel coolant increase to the jeopardy - so you need a apparatus able of carrying out the job by remote control.

"It's a flattering complex chronicle of a Swiss armed forces blade the group came up with."

Up to 3 apparatus pieces will be in use at any a time and may be transposed by other 3 carried in a special apparatus box without the must be eliminate the apparatus itself from the reactor.

The rest of the apparatus pieces will be stored on top of the reactor and would be propitious in to place during service and continuance breaks.

Special radiation-proof cameras and spotlights will guide operators working around the timepiece in a manage room 6m (20ft) on top of the reactor.

The device, written and built by French definite Framatome, is amid the many costly in the Dounreay "tool box".

Others include a 100,000 siren crawler, a device described by its operators as a hi-tech worm, that was deployed to investigate the condition of a tube once used to secretion hot effluent from the site.

A van-sized appurtenance has moreover been retrieving hot particles from the seabed nearby Dounreay.

But plan expenses have moreover been cut with the use of domicile cleaning products in the clean-up of equipment private from the initial chief power plant.