Remote operations on the furnace assembly and product canister in high-level waste vitrification plant at Tarapur and scope for automation in future such plants

Vitrification of high level liquid waste produced in a fuel reprocessing plant is carried out inside a concrete cell with provisons for all operations on the main equipment, that is the induction heated furnace, to be carried out by remote handling gadgets. Since each canister of the vitrified waste product in a batch can contain upto 0.6 million curie of activity, these operations are required to be highly reliable. The present plant has provisions for these remote operations mainly by manual mode using remote handling gadgets like power manipulator, MSMs, incell crane etc. With the advent of advanced technology of automation and possible use of robotics, it is considered that a much more reliable, less time consuming and efficient operation can be carried out using such techniques. This paper describes the present mode of operation in the cell and points out the areas in which automation of these operations can be adopted. (author). 3 figs