Tele-handling equipment and procedures are well established in many applications, but not for the particular case of waste emplacement in a deep geological repository.

The special challenges involve handling of heavy waste packages in very restricted spaces and emplacement of highly compacted bentonite buffer in a quality assured manner. The latter is particularly tricky under the wet conditions generally experienced underground - especially when this has to be done thousands or tens of thousands of times.

The tele-handling systems developed must not only be very robust (i.e. insensitive to minor perturbations), but also failsafe in the event of major perturbations - so that there are no safety consequences and recovery / remediation is straightforward.

This project will develop and test at full scale a first generation of such tele-handling systems, with the intention of assuring that well tried and tested technology is available when major repository projects are implemented later this century. Such a long development time can be justified not only by the potential savings resulting from optimised operations, but also reduction of the risk of accidents or perturbations which can be enormously costly - both financially and in terms of loss of public confidence.

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