en.Wedoany.com Reported - CNNC Sichuan Environmental Protection, a subsidiary of CNNC Environmental Protection, recently won the bid for a research and development project on intelligent equipment for decontaminating nuclear fuel replacement pools at a nuclear power plant. The project aims to develop a domestically produced, fully automated complete set of equipment for decontaminating replacement pools, replacing manual operations with robots. Relying on a master-slave collaborative operation architecture, it will achieve full-process automatic decontamination, driving the upgrade of nuclear power operation and maintenance towards safety and intelligence.

The fuel replacement pool is a core facility for refueling and overhaul in nuclear power plants. During long-term operation, activated corrosion deposits continuously raise the regional radiation environment level. Traditional manual wiping operations prolong the stay time of personnel in radiation areas, making it difficult to meet the requirements of radiation protection optimization; chemical decontamination methods tend to corrode the stainless steel pool body and generate large amounts of radioactive liquid waste. Addressing these industry pain points, CNNC Sichuan Environmental Protection integrated the MD market development system, the IPD integrated product development system, and the "Iron Triangle" integrated operation model to form a dedicated task force. It directed the development of an integrated set of technologies for magnetic adsorption wall-climbing and remote decontamination, and completed multiple rounds of operational condition simulation and technical solution optimization. The solution received high recognition from the owner for its pioneering nature.

This project adopts a remote unmanned operation mode, which can fundamentally avoid the radiation risks faced by operation and maintenance personnel and reduce the collective radiation dose during overhaul periods. The developed equipment will be equipped with autonomous path planning algorithms and integrate capabilities for high-pressure flushing, fine wiping, and water accumulation suction, covering the entire decontamination process of the pool. At the same time, the project will tackle the technology of magnetic adsorption wall-climbing, adapting it to low-magnetic stainless steel walls to achieve stable adsorption and movement on the pool bottom, vertical surfaces, and corners, solving the problems of insufficient adsorption force and limited operation of traditional equipment. In the future, the project aims to achieve a technological breakthrough in this specific scenario, forming an integrated decontamination system and providing a replicable and scalable standardized solution for decontamination operations in similar high-radiation areas of nuclear power plants in China.