“The number one rule in lifting is ‘If you don’t have to lift it, don’t lift it’,” said Jennifer Gilmour, chair of the Nuclear Lifting seminar, to Professional Engineering. The IMechE fellow, who has chaired the event since 2020, has a decade of experience in nuclear engineering in Scotland, including seven years at Dounreay where she was the technical expert on lifting.
The 10th anniversary of the event, which shares engineering solutions to the technical and environmental challenges facing high-risk lifts, includes presentations on a ‘holistic approach’ to risk management with the Office for Nuclear Regulation, predictive maintenance for cranes, and updates from Hinkley Point C. Jacobs will also run a session on a novel design for an in-cell crane at Iter, the world’s largest fusion experiment in France.
Nuclear lifting includes any lifting operations across the entire lifecycle of a plant, from construction and operation through to decommissioning and demolition, using cranes as well as forklifts and lorry-mounted cranes. Sometimes the load itself is nuclear material, such as fuel, while other times it is a conventional load within a nuclear environment.
“Either way, the lift is hazardous,” said Gilmour, chartered engineer at Gilmour Engineering Services Ltd. “We're always assessing the risks. So you're not just assessing the risk of the load itself, but you're also looking at the environment around it.”
Gravity “will always want to try and defeat any operation that you're doing,” said the active member of the National Nuclear Lifting Forum. “The nuclear industry has some additional challenges… whether that is lifting a nuclear load, or whether it's lifting in and around nuclear plants, which obviously has a potential radiological or contamination aspect, should anything go wrong.
“The other thing that nuclear has to contend with is... the public's perception of nuclear. Whilst the risks can be mitigated in exactly the same way as any other industry, because of the historical challenges that we've had within the nuclear world, including Chernobyl… there's almost a fear factor in terms of an accident on a nuclear site.”
In the worst-case scenario, the wider environment and people outside the plant could be at risk in the event of an accident, although the likelihood of this is very small. In a situation where any mistake could threaten the future of the industry, extra precautions and extra time are taken to ensure everything is done properly.
Engineers will take the same approach as the industry evolves with the potential introduction of small modular reactors (SMRs) and fusion reactors, Gilmour said.
“The considerations there will be slightly different because they're looking at different components et cetera, but the approach should be exactly the same,” she said. “If we can design out the lifting operation from the start, then we're already putting ourselves in a safer position, and that's one of the things that designers are being challenged across the board with, with new technologies and as things evolve, is to try and design out those risks – whether that's a lifting operation risk, whether that's a pressure systems risk.”
General approaches might include staggering lift jobs that are due to happen in the same area, to reduce the risk.
The IMechE event is a vital forum for knowledge sharing, Gilmour said. “There's some fantastic pieces of equipment available these days, particularly in the monitoring of assets in the nuclear industry. We have a lot of ageing assets, for example, so understanding them, understanding what their limitations are… is really important,” she said.
“The technology is there, the potential is there for people – we just need to harness that as an industry. I don't think there's any problem that engineers can't overcome if we work together and we have a budget.”
She added: “As engineers, we need to understand what the problems are before we can fix them. So when something goes wrong, nine times out of 10 it has been foreseeable if we knew what to look for, if we knew where to look, if we had that data. But if we don't have that data, if we don't have that understanding, then we can't put things in place to prevent any incidents or accidents… everything all feeds into this big picture of data that helps us make the right decisions going forward.”
Nuclear Lifting 2024 will be held in Manchester on 19 November. Visit the IMechE event page for more information and to book tickets.
Want the best engineering stories delivered straight to your inbox? The Professional Engineering newsletter gives you vital updates on the most cutting-edge engineering and exciting new job opportunities. To sign up, click here.
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.