A MAJOR nuclear decommissioning project has taken a massive leap forward with the arrival of a new piece of equipment. 

Sellafield has invested in a new piece of technology to help with the decommissioning of one of its most hazardous buildings. 

The Silo Emptying Plant is akin to a giant fairground grabber on wheels that painstakingly removes waste from the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS) - an ageing storage plant that has been prioritised for clean up. 

Over the next few months, the Silo Empty Plant (SEP) will arrive in 33 separate deliveries that will be brought by road from Wolverhampton to the Sellafield site. 

It is the first of three similar plants to arrive in West Cumbria and marks a significant step forward in the decommissioning process. 

The three plants will be developed with Ansaldo NES, who successfully dismantled and tested the machines at a replica MSSS store at their Midland's base.

Each plant weighs more than 30 double decker buses and will undergo a thorough assembly and testing process before it begins work. 

The SEP machines will be required to work in an extremely radioactive environment. They are expected to play a vital role in the clean up of Sellafield as they remove an estimated 11,000m 2 of historic waste and 60,000 items of miscellaneous beta gamma waste from the 22 underwater MSSS compartments. 

The machines will lock onto the silo hatches and lower specialist grabs into the 16 metre deep waste compartments to bring up the nuclear waste, pack it into special boxes and safely transfer it to one of the site's modern stores. 

It will then be kept secure until a decision has been made on a long term storage solution.

 Alan Haile, head of MSSS projects, explained the complex process. 

He said: “The SEP design is complex, it has to be to deal with the significant challenge of retrieving wastes from MSSS, but is based on simple, robust concepts. 

“Think of one of those fairground machines with a metal arm that struggles to grab soft toys, but imagine it on a huge scale within a radioactive environment, grabbing huge volumes of potentially hazardous material with absolute precision from 22 underwater compartments and transferring into safe storage, with no room for error.”