S.A.Robotics

Client	Los Alamos National Laboratory
Facility	DOE Los Alamos National Laboratory
Location	Los Alamos, NM

The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has approximately 180 CMP’s (corrugated metal pipes) that will be recovered from underground storage at TA-54 (waste disposal area), remotely size reduced and repackage into a SWB’s (Standard Waste Boxes) for re-disposal to WIPP. LANL tasked S.A.Robotics with preparing an informational/animation from pre-conceptual drawings. The presentations were developed for LANL and DOE NNSA to better help illustrate how this process would work and to highlight areas of concern. This presentation was also a key factor in helping to establish and bound the Authorization Basis (AB) for this project.

Each CMP is a corrugated metal culvert pipe (30” in diameter by 20’ in length) filled with a Pug Mill paste mixture that contained a slurry of Pu-238 & 239 along with other radionuclides mixed with cement. The CMP’s are basically a metal culvert pipe filled with hardened concrete. The process need is to size reduce the CMP’s using a diamond wire or band-saw type saw, and cut them into 4’ sections and place one section each in a SWB box. The movement, cutting, loading, and processing of the cutting coolant and cutting fines need to be done in a well-ventilated and controlled enclosure and be preformed remotely. Two saws will be used, so that two cuts can be made at the same time. Four cuts per CMP will produce five, 4ft sections for loading into the SWB’s. Two SWB bag-on/bag-out ports are required, to allow more efficient processing of the CMP’s. The cuttings and coolant need to be removed and handled remotely and placed into 55 gallon drums as well.

S.A.Robotics used animation software to animate the attached drawings and information into a fully animated presentation. The animation started with a CMP entering the process area and end as a SWB box leaving the process area. All movement of CMP’s, saws, conveyors, hoists, jib crane, remote handling equipment, coolant, cuttings recovery, 55 gallon drums, doors, airlocks, pass-thru ports, SWB movements were included in the animation. Dome and Perma-Con rooms were shown at the start, and the outlines shall were shown afterward in the animation. Annotation of all key equipment were included along with still pictures clearly illustrating all equipment. This project was delivered with a firm fixed price and on an accelerated schedule.