A Department of Energy (DOE) Pit Disassembly and Conversion Facility (PDCF) is being designed for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The facility will recover plutonium from excess nuclear weapon pits defined in START II and START III treaties. The plutonium will be stored and used to produce mixed oxide reactor fuel at another new DOE facility. Because of radiation dose issues, much of the pit disassembly work and material transfer will be automated. Automated material handling systems will interface with disassembly lathes, conversion reactors that produce oxide for storage, robotic container welding stations, vault retrieval systems, and nondestructive assay (NDA) instrumentation. The goal is to use common motion control hardware for material transfer and possibly common motion controllers for the unique PDCF systems. The latter is complicated by the different directions manufactures are considering for distributed control, such as Firewire, SERCOS, etc., and by the unique control requirements of machine such as lathes compared to controls for an integrated NDA system. The current design approach is to standardize where possible, use network cables to replace wire bundles where possible, but to first select hardware and motion controllers that meet specific machine or process requirements.
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