A Cumbrian engineering company has won a major part of a £5.5m radioactive waste segregation competition.
Barrnon, which is based in Appleby, solves problems in harsh environments by making modular robotics, primarily for the nuclear decommissioning industry. It’s the second government competition aimed at nuclear facility decommissioning that Barrnon has been awarded.
Owner Andy Barr said: “We are incredibly proud of our unique work. It recognises the strengths of our organisation. This is another great achievement.”
Barrnon is a recognised innovative design and build engineering business. It has created the Barrnon Limited Innovative Sort and Segregate System (BLISSS) — a concept that takes what human operatives do during nuclear decommissioning and replaces them with an artificial system — with the ability to sort and segregate nuclear wastes.
And now it’s one of five companies to win a contract to build a demonstrator for site.
The first phase of the competition, run in partnership with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), Magnox Ltd, Sellafield Ltd and Innovate UK, asked companies to submit proposals on how they would bring together innovative techniques and technology to tackle this ‘rad-waste’ challenge. The competition — — against 14 world class decommissioning competitors — was run by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), Magnox Ltd, Sellafield Ltd and Innovate UK. It asked companies to submit proposals on how they would tackle radioactive waste – reducing the number of waste containers sent for disposal and reducing the hazard to people and the environment. NDA’s Head of Innovation, Sara Huntingdon, said: “We’re extremely impressed with the calibre of proposals received from the supply chain, and I am delighted that we’ve been able to increase the number of companies we’re taking through to the next phase.” “We had originally planned to fund three demonstrators but, because we received such a broad range of ideas which could benefit our sites in future, we’re taking more forwards into phase two. This demonstrates our ongoing commitment to research and development and could help deliver the NDA’s mission safer, faster and in a way that costs less in the future.”
This award follows hot on the heels of Barrnon’s previous competition success. This new project is called the Barrnon Limited Innovative Sort and Segregate System (BLISSS). The key guiding principle of BLISSS is that the system is biomimetic — it is a synthetic system that emulates the strategy, tactics and techniques of biological organisms – nuclear operatives – doing the same task.
Barrnon has a track record in partner collaboration and global delivery and it has unwavering confidence in the BLISSS technology being the ideal solution for sorting and segregating nuclear waste from decommissioning, with evidence to support it.
Barrnon won the previous Small business Research Initiative (SBRI) competition called Innovative Integrated Nuclear
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