Ford handbrake and can-openers drive nuclear innovation
EXPERTS surveying the inside of a decommissioned nuclear reactor created a tool from the handbrake of a 1968 Fort Cortina to aid their work.
NC
The homemade device is the latest item fashioned from everyday objects by the team working at Dounreay in Caithness.
The Mark II Ford’s parts were used, along with the cutting wheels from four can-openers, to study the interior of the facility’s Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR).
Blu-Tack and other household items have previously been used during the £1billion shutdown operation that has seen scientists tasked with finding cheaper ways to deal with the hazardous material that is left at the site.
In an attempt to retrieve pieces of radioactive metal from the inside of the station’s Prototype Fast Reactor, staff resorted to using Blu-Tack attached to a 10m pole to fish out the material.
The homemade solution saved scientists from having to come up with a more time-consuming and costly new design for a specialist tool to do the job, reportedly saving thousands of pounds.
NC
The handbrake from the scrapped Ford was adapted by Chris Irwin, a senior design engineer, who came up with the idea while making a snack.
He said: “I was opening a can of beans at home and realised that the cutting wheel of a can opener was exactly what was needed to make the required diamond-shaped wheel.
“I bought four of them and took the wheels off.
“The camera needed to be guided over obstacles within the reactor, so we realised the incremental nature of the clicks on a handbrake would give us the precise control that we needed.”
Staff at Dounreay are frequently challenged to find cheap ways of helping the decommissioning work at the plant near Thurso.
NC
Previous innovations have included using a silver ironing board cover and a duvet to make a hood to insulate and protect a robotic camera built to explore pipes.
Cardboard tubes inside rolls of paper towels have been utilised as a solution to a problem operating a piece of equipment used to treat radioactive waste at the plant.
And a design engineer at Dounreay used the castors off his own living room couch to stop a machine dubbed the “hedgehog” from toppling over.
The device was built to probe radioactivity levels and shoot video inside the PFR.
In tests, the device kept toppling over when turning corners.
However, senior design engineer Calder Bain used the castors to stabilise the “hedgehog”.
