Innovative robotic sorting technology to reduce hazardous wastes

4,7 million m3 of solid nuclear waste are piling up in silos worldwide, awaiting final disposal. By 2050, they will be 11,4 million m3. Regulation is pushing for their reconditioning.

However, only a few waste recovery programs are running today, where each piece of waste is sorted by human teleoperators.

It takes 10-years and millions of euro to sort a 500m3 silo, with risks of error every ten pieces, radiation exposure, and contamination of the environment.

This is poorly effective.These heterogeneous wastes are so instable that automated sorting is deemed impossible.With this project, SILÉANE will scale up its autonomous waste sorting robotic system, currently applied to civil waste-producing industries, to clean up more than half of the past century’s nuclear waste production and reduce the number of future hazardous wastes generated by this industry and other civil applications.The project will deliver a full-scale demonstrator of an integrated robotic system that will sort and segregate these wastes automatically and error-free into optimised containers.

They will be extracted one by one before crossing a scanning “red line” emitted by the system.

Their nature will be accurately characterized (radioactivity emission, chemical composition) with all data recorded in inventories.

This process is 2,5 times faster than teleoperation, costs 3 times less and is safe, leaving less waste behind. 80% of the waste will go for reconditioning and recycling (versus 30% today). During feasibility phase, it showed a 99,5% accuracy rate on 540 tons of waste.

SILEANE will grab the lead in the global nuclear waste sorting market (30% market share by 2030) and improve its market shares in the civil waste market, where the trend for automation is booming as well.

Finally, SILÉANE will scale-up its organizational structure to address an increasing number of heterogeneous waste-producing industries worldwide. This project will raise the bar for SILÉANE at the corporate level.