WACPAC - Efficient packing of decommissioning waste which meets the waste acceptance criteria for disposal

WACPAC -- efficient packing of decommissioning waste which meets the waste acceptance criteria for disposal

WACPAC is an autonomous system for assigning items from decommissioning operations to the correct waste stream. Particular emphasis is placed on accurate separations at the waste category boundaries and for identifying decontaminable items to minimise disposal costs. The system also supports packing items into containers efficiently and generation of detailed manifests of the package contents.

The WACPAC project fuses the nuclear materials assay capability of ANTECH, the machine vision and robotics expertise of ARM Robotics and the University of Birmingham's Extreme Robotics Laboratory (ERL), the advanced X-ray capabilities of Metrix NDT, the stand-off materials identification capability of CAP Fraunhofer and the nuclear knowledge and righall capabilities of the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) to sort and segregate random items into the appropriate waste category.