Award winning nuclear drone team are flying high
Sellafield Ltd's UAV team is celebrating after winning a Nuclear Manufacturing Award and being shortlisted for two Engineering and Manufacturing Awards.
From left to right: Samuel Jay, Luke Henley, Amanda Smith, Niall Paterson, Adrian Johnson, Sellafield Ltd
The team that manages Sellafield바카라 사이트™s fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been recognised for their work this week after winning an award for innovation at the first ever Nuclear Manufacturing Awards.
Their winning entry demonstrated how the team has worked with partners to introduce UAVs to carry our monitoring and remote inspections on equipment and buildings at Sellafield and other nuclear sites in the UK.
An unmanned aerial vehicle being flown on the Sellafield site.
UAVs remove the need for humans to enter hazardous environments, confined spaces, or to work at dangerous heights; improving safety and delivering results more quickly than was previously possible.
They also provide high quality inspection data, allowing engineers to gather information and make informed decisions more effectively.
This means significant costs savings for the taxpayer. In 2022/23 alone the UAV programme helped avoid costs of over £4 million when compared to traditional inspection methods.
New for 2023, the Nuclear Manufacturing Awards are part of the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre바카라 사이트™s annual summit that brings together hundreds of manufacturers from across the country with the leaders of the UK바카라 사이트™s major nuclear programmes.
The team was also shortlisted for two Engineering and Manufacturing Awards in the innovation and health, safety and wellbeing categories recently, receiving a 바카라 사이트˜highly commended바카라 사이트™ for their submission to the latter.
Amanda Smith, Sellafield Ltd바카라 사이트™s UAV equipment programme lead, said:
We바카라 사이트™re honoured to have won the Nuclear Manufacturing Award for innovation and the recognition this brings for the team.
UAVs have now become the standard method for remote inspections at Sellafield, showing the lasting impact of these innovative approaches on the culture of our organisation.
I바카라 사이트™m proud to demonstrate how we바카라 사이트™re helping to make a clean and safe environment for future generations in a safer, faster and cheaper way than was ever thought possible before.
Sara Huntingdon, head of innovation at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), said:
This is a fantastic example highlighting how the nuclear sector is embracing innovation to improve safety and accelerate decommissioning.
Testing and trialling new approaches, Â and deploying new technologies which help us deliver our decommissioning mission safely and more effectively is something we actively want to celebrate and encourage 바카라 사이트“ it바카라 사이트™s is a core part of our innovation strategy.
The work undertaken at Sellafield by the UAV team, and across the wider NDA Group on remote sensing approaches, recognises the good work of the teams involved and that real progress is being made against our innovation aims 바카라 사이트“ to monitor our buildings remotely by 2025 and to capture data at source by 2030 바카라 사이트“ as set out in our 바카라 사이트œGrand Challenges for Technical Innovation