NRT-LEAD > Research Thrusts > Nuclear

Nuclear

Confronting High-Risk Hazardous Working Conditions:

Southcentral Washington is home to the 580-square mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the nation’s largest and most complex environmental cleanup effort. Confronting risks due to groundwater contamination reaching the Columbia River, leaking tanks, and radiation exposures to workers, NRT-LEAD researchers are aiding contractors working on the site (e.g., Washington River Protection Solution, PNNL) to develop new technologies to facilitate the removal of the semi-solid wastes from the storage tanks. To alleviate the health and exposure risks to workers, specially designed remote-operated robotic equipment has been employed to loosen and retrieve semi-solid waste from the tanks and to monitor conditions within the tanks. In this type of hazardous working condition, autonomous and robotic systems require not only skilled operators, but a support team capable of recognizing, diagnosing and repairing problems before they cause catastrophic failure and render a robotic system unrecoverable. Our team members are working on the following projects to demonstrate the effectiveness of robotic-based cleanup approaches for the Hanford site, as well as the existing and future needs for skilled operators and developers of autonomous and robotic systems for environmental cleanup, restoration, and monitoring.

  • Autonomous Platform for Nuclear Waste Monitoring (Dr. S. Hudson)
  • A 4D Autonomous Robotic System for Nuclear Waste (Dr. C. Mo)
  • 3D Convolutional Neural Networks for inspection of repositories (Dr. J. Swensen)
  • Computer Vision for Sensor Tracking in Double-Shell Nuclear Tanks (Dr. J. Miller)
  • Halide Perovskite Materials for Radiation Detection (Dr. X. Guo)
Hanford Nuclear site
Prototype of an autonomous vehicle.
A report produced by a neural network, detecting damage.
defects on a tank detected by a support team.