iDROP: An Innovative Software Program to Design Nuclear Decommissioning Scenarios

Many historic nuclear facilities have reached the end of their lifetimes and are now being decontaminated and dismantled. Our institute has been working on an innovative computing solution to simulate intervention scenarios in highly radioactive environments that humans cannot enter. Various treatment techniques can be compared and workers can be trained before operating on site. For the past 10 years, our institute has been developing a Virtual Reality tool that simulates all the key elements of a nuclear project, including the remote handling, and the accessibility of the site for humans, and the dose assessment associated. This tool allows all these parameters to be computed in a single interactive environment, allowing predefined scenarios to be verified and alternative solutions to be designed. This software is presented in the following paper; we here illustrate that it is particularly well-suited to dismantling projects. We also describe a first application of the tool to investigate radiological exposure scenarios. The advantages of this software include its user-friendliness, responsiveness, speed, and usefulness for the preparation of complex dismantling operations. The perspectives of this project include the simulation in Virtual Reality of human interventions.