Safety-driven design in nuclear automation: the LNL approach to remote handling and process control

by Dr Giordano Lilli (INFN - LNL)

Tuesday 9 Sept 2025, 10:30 → 12:30 Europe/Rome

C. Villi meeting room

Automation technologies employed in process control and critical tasks within nuclear facilities provide clear advantages in ensuring safety of personnel and reducing staff exposure, but they also involve reliability challenges and safety implications connected with potential failure scenarios during operation. Nuclear laboratories and industrial automation sectors exhibit quite distinct approaches to safety assessment and harmonization.

This seminar will present different LNL applications that draw advantages from industrial automation. The first section will provide a comprehensive overview of the framework implemented in the SPES nuclear research facility for the automated transport and storage of highly radioactive Target Ion Source (TIS) units, describing the entire project life cycle from the preliminary design stage to the final commissioning and deployment. The following section will address the advantages of industrial automation applied to a ³He ⁴He dilution refrigerator refurbishment for both axions research and quantum computing as part of the PNRR ICSC Spoke 10 project.

Starting with current equipment, the talk aims to showcase how the early integration of safety into the design process might be advantageous for both reliability enhancement and risk reduction. In the SPES use-case, a hybrid risk assessment approach systematically investigated severe failure scenarios that might occur during remote handling procedures. The analysis proposed different safeguards, recommendations, and design upgrades meant to increase the robustness and maintainability of key components. In addition, the most critical maintenance tasks have been evaluated in an extensive experimental campaign that allowed to optimize the interventions in accordance with the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) principles and to estimate the time required for each specific activity. In the last section, safety of automation software is discussed. Overall, the adoption of the described techniques resulted in a significant increase in the level of safety of the facility’s automation. The proposed approach can be easily extended to the design of safety-critical systems in other contexts.