You have almost certainly seen a Boston Dynamics Spot doing something clever in a video. Dancing in formation, opening a door for another robot, trotting up a flight of stairs while an engineer films it on a phone. Robot dogs are very good at going viral, and for most of the past decade that has been the bulk of the work.<\/p>\n
One of them now has a permanent position, and the job is spectacularly dull. Sellafield Ltd has taken its customised Spot robots off trial duty and moved them into what a case study published on GOV.UK<\/a> calls “routine, business-as-usual operations.” No more demos. The dogs are on the roster.<\/p>\n That roster is worth understanding. Sellafield is the most hazardous site on the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s estate, according to the National Audit Office<\/a>, which is about as close as Britain gets to an impartial referee on this stuff.<\/p>\n Seven shut-down reactors sit on it. So does the entire UK stockpile of civil-owned plutonium. Some of the buildings went up in the 1940s and do not meet modern construction standards, and three are formally rated an “intolerable” risk.<\/p>\n The forecast cost of cleaning the place up is \u00a3136 billion. The work is scheduled to finish in 2125, which is not a typo.<\/p>\n Sellafield’s Spot is not the one from the videos. Createc rebuilt it for the nuclear job and now keeps the fleet running, bolting hardened sensing gear and fatter data payloads onto a machine that already coped with staircases and bad footing.<\/p>\n Sellafield’s own list of what the thing carries runs to 360-degree imaging, 3D LiDAR scanning, gamma and alpha characterisation, swabbing, photo and video capture, environmental monitoring and, oddly for a sensor list, size reduction. That last one is the industry’s polite term for cutting things into smaller pieces.<\/p>\n What it does with all that is unglamorous. It walks a route, maps a room in 3D, measures how radioactive the surfaces are, and streams the lot back to somebody at a screen. Then it walks the identical route again next month, which is a thing humans are famously bad at.<\/p>\n None of that is impressive on its own. The rooms are. In 2023\/24 a customised Spot entered a C5 area at Sellafield for the first time, C5 being the site’s label for highly radiological. Getting a human into one means the full protective rig, a tightly controlled entry, and a clock running the entire time they are inside. A robot has no clock. Sellafield says so plainly: it can stay in there far longer than a person can.<\/p>\n There is a waste argument underneath it too. Every human trip into a contaminated area burns protective equipment that then has to be disposed of. Send the dog and there is no suit to bury afterwards.<\/p>\n Compare that with Japan, where TEPCO needed a purpose-built 4.6-ton robotic arm<\/a> to reach the melted fuel inside Fukushima, a one-off machine for a one-off room. Sellafield bought a robot anyone can order, then spent five years teaching an institution to trust it.<\/p>\n Swabbing is the unglamorous backbone of radiation safety. Sellafield’s health physics team runs hundreds of swabs a day, pressing circular paper filters against surfaces to see what comes off. The results feed the safety case and the decommissioning plan.<\/p>\n It is also a nightmare to automate, because the motion a human uses to wipe something is not a straight line and never has been.<\/p>\n In February, Sellafield and RAICo said they had solved it. RAICo is the robotics collaboration between the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the NDA, Sellafield Ltd, the University of Manchester and AWE Nuclear Security Technologies, and it built a patent-pending swab tool for Spot’s arm.<\/p>\n The tool pairs an off-the-shelf haptic controller from Haply Robotics with custom RAICo software that reads an operator’s real hand movements and turns them into commands for the robot. The operator makes the wiping motion. The arm reproduces it on the wall.<\/p>\n The demonstration itself is the funny part. Per Sellafield Ltd and the NDA<\/a>, they sent Spot into a restricted area containing radioactive material, gave it a simulated spill to inspect, and had it swab a mock-contaminated surface. What it carried back out was blue chalk.<\/p>\n A robot dog in a genuinely radioactive room, delicately retrieving a sample of arts-and-crafts chalk, is not the image the nuclear industry usually leads with. It worked, though.<\/p>\n Deon Bulman, ROV equipment programme lead in Sellafield’s Remote Technologies Group, said the haptic feedback delivers “precise, human-like manipulation” and cuts task time. RAICo had already run a similar tool inactive at the Joint European Torus fusion facility at Culham during 2025, so it arrived at Sellafield with a track record.<\/p>\n Trials are cheap, and everybody runs them. Most stay trials.<\/p>\n Business-as-usual is much harder. It means the robot has a slot in the operating plan, the safety case, the cyber security regime and the training programme. Sellafield lays out the shopping list in the same case study: linking robot data to digital twins and plant information systems, designing new sensing payloads, scaling secure remote operation to more platforms, and tightening security around all of it.<\/p>\n Sellafield says it has been developing and deploying these robots for more than two years, and its published timeline starts earlier than that. A three-day trial in 2021, supported by the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s RACE team. Use cases and active demonstrations across 2022 and 2023. The first C5 deployment in 2023\/24.<\/p>\n Then, in March 2025, the one that changed the arithmetic. Operators sat in an immersive room at Westlakes Science Park in Whitehaven, outside the licensed site altogether, and drove Spot around Sellafield over a secure network with live-streamed video. AtkinsR\u00e9alis had done virtual site access on big construction jobs before, but never on a nuclear licensed site.<\/p>\n On June 30, the NDA and Nuclear Restoration Services published details of two robotics trials<\/a> at Oldbury, a shut-down power station in South Gloucestershire.<\/p>\n The problem there is fuel element debris, which is roughly what it sounds like. Broken-up bits of the hardware that once held nuclear fuel, and it is highly radioactive. The fuel itself was separated out years ago and shipped off to Sellafield for reprocessing. The debris stayed put, and now somebody has to go and get it, piece by piece, and sort it.<\/p>\n The current method is worth picturing. A person climbs into full PPE, takes hold of a long tool with a gripper on the far end, and works it over the top of a thick shielding wall while watching a screen. Every lump of debris is an odd shape. Each one has to end up in the correct container.<\/p>\n It is fiddly, it is slow, and it parks a human right beside the thing you would rather they stood well away from.<\/p>\n NRS and RAICo want to swap those long poles for a robot arm running the same haptic idea that made Spot’s swab tool work. Move your hand and the gripper moves. Push the gripper into something solid and you feel it shove back.<\/p>\n RAICo also built a control layer called SPOCK<\/a>, short for Single Point Operator Control Kit. It puts a live camera feed and a 3D model of the sorting cell on one screen, and it lets an operator rehearse a move on the model first, watching a translucent copy of the arm walk the path to make sure the real one will not clip anything.<\/p>\n Varun Kumar, a robotics engineer at RAICo, put the obstacle plainly: everybody wants robot arms in decommissioning, but “precision control and risk management are blockers.” Which is precisely what Sellafield spent five years grinding through with the dog.<\/p>\n The Oldbury arms are not there yet, and that matters. RAICo ran an inactive on-site demo in March, left the kit for operators to get familiar with, and is working toward active trials. Auto-SAS, the fully autonomous sorting system, is backed by \u00a39.5 million of NDA money over four years and is not due to start commissioning until around mid-2027.<\/p>\n Prof Melanie Brownridge, the NDA’s chief R&D officer, said the authority is using robotics across its 18 sites to move people further from harm. Sellafield is the one furthest down that road.<\/p>\n For all the detail Sellafield has put out, one number is missing: how many of these robots are actually working. The case study does not say, and no figure appears in the published material.<\/p>\n There is an open question about the hardware, too. Spot is American, and Britain is putting American robots inside critical national infrastructure. Sellafield’s position is that all robotic technology will meet the nuclear sector’s security requirements, which is a policy rather than an answer. When The Register put the cybersecurity question to Sellafield in January, along with whether humanoids might be next, it reported no reply by the time it published.<\/p>\n Those numbers are why the dog exists. They are also why America runs a 300-ton melter at Hanford<\/a> that can never be switched off, and why Finland has spent two decades digging a hole<\/a> designed to hold the stuff for 100,000 years. Everybody who started splitting atoms last century is still paying for it.<\/p>\nThe dog’s day job is mostly boring<\/h2>\n
A robot that swabs like a human is stranger than a robot that walks<\/h2>\n
Coming off trials matters more than the first walk into an active cell did<\/h2>\n
The same trick is already moving to a second site<\/h2>\n
Nobody has published how many dogs there are<\/h2>\n
The dog is not the expensive part<\/h2>\n