Sellafield - robot dogs
Posted: 7th November 2025
The robot dogs burying Sellafield’s nuclear waste. Tasked with disposing
of tons of radioactive material, experts at the power plant are training
canine automatons to do the dirty work. A huddle has formed inside an old
warehouse at the end of a narrow lane on the west Cumbrian coast. All eyes
are on Spot, a yellow robot dog with a slender neck and head that look more
like those of a demonic swan than a golden retriever. Versions of the
multipurpose robot, made in the United States by Boston Dynamics and
commercially available since 2019, have achieved viral fame online. They
have done triple backflips, opened doors and performed as a breakdancing
troupe on America’s Got Talent. Cumbrian Spot, which trots with the
rhythmic deliberation of a dressage pony, is sitting on its haunches. Its
legs are folded tightly as it rolls onto its back, revealing its belly.
“That’s so you can switch it off and remove its battery,” says Jeff
Slater, a robotics engineer who is demonstrating the machine with a
controller that looks like a big Nintendo Switch console. Essentially a
nuclear robotics laboratory, RAICo is home to clever people tasked with
developing a new generation of robots and control systems to make safer,
faster and cheaper the mind-blowingly complex and costly task of
decommissioning old nuclear sites. At Sellafield, the most dangerous waste
that is now being retrieved, stored and – eventually – buried will
remain radioactive for 100,000 years. I first catch a glimpse of Sellafield
from above. Dodging sheep as I navigate the winding roads of the Lake
District, I see nothing but green fields and grazed fells. Then a concrete
jumble of more than 1,000 buildings appears, with steaming chimneys and
steel blocks as big as cathedrals. Wedged between the Lakes and the Irish
Sea, Sellafield is roughly half the size of London’s Heathrow airport. It
would take two hours to walk around its high-security perimeter. Work is
under way to retrieve waste and store it more safely, in the way that
modern nuclear waste is now already kept – in reinforced steel containers
piled up in high-security vaults, or in modern cooling pools or ponds,
using robots to help keep humans as far away from the material as possible.
And that is the tricky bit at Sellafield, which is essentially a giant
nuclear chemistry set assembled in a Cold War era of haste and
experimentation. “Working out waste routes wasn’t thought about at that
time,” says Roddy Miller, a Scottish nuclear engineer and Sellafield’s
chief operating officer. “They thought, ‘Let’s leave that for later
because it’s not a priority’. Well, it’s a priority now.” Back at
RAICo, Spot is the most eye-catching and versatile robot being developed or
adapted for the retrievals and storage process. It will join dozens of
machines that are already employed at Sellafield. Slater and his team
recently put Spot into an anti-contamination suit and sent it into a
formerly sealed room at the site to retrieve debris, using its mouth as a
high-end litter picker. In another mission, it was equipped with laser
surveying technology to create 3D maps of abandoned interiors.
Telegraph 5th Nov 2025
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/05/robot-dogs-sellafield-nuclear-waste/