Taking out nuclear washing

Ainscough Crane Hire’s Bristol, UK depot recently supported Nuclear Restoration Services (NRS) with a l lift operation that will see redundant laundry machines from the Oldbury nuclear site safely repurposed and recycled.

NRS is responsible for the safe decommissioning of the UK’s first-generation nuclear and research sites. For this project, NRS appointed Ainscough to assist with a critical operation at Oldbury, a nuclear power station currently undergoing decommissioning. Located on the south bank of the River Severn in South Gloucestershire, Oldbury is one of the UK’s oldest nuclear facilities.

The operation involved lifting 14 redundant industrial laundry machines from a rooftop location. These machines had previously cleaned thousands of items of contaminated workwear and were identified for removal and repurposing. Due to their potential contamination with low-level radioactive waste, the project required detailed coordination and stringent safety planning.

Working in close collaboration with the NRS site team, Ainscough ensured compliance with all safety protocols and regulatory requirements for handling and transporting the machines.

As part of the full contract lift, Ainscough deployed a 40t crane and used 2m x 1.2m ekki mats to facilitate the lift. Each laundry machine weighed approximately 0.25t and was lifted at a 12m radius. A scaffold platform was constructed to enable a goods cage to be positioned and safely lifted from the second-floor laundry room to the roof.

The machines were then securely transported off-site under the supervision of NRS’s waste management team to ensure full compliance with transport regulations.

Removing the redundant units at this stage prevents future deterioration and avoids them becoming waste. The machines will now be refurbished and repurposed at UniTech’s specialist nuclear laundry facility in South Wales.

Peyton Gregory-Jemson, internal sales executive at Ainscough Crane Hire, says, “Supporting projects like this is at the heart of what we do here at Ainscough. Working alongside NRS and UniTech, we ensured the lift was carried out efficiently, safely, and with the highest attention to detail. It’s great to see this equipment given a new lease of life as part of the wider decommissioning effort.”

James Hanford, mechanical engineer at NRS, says, “This was a complex project that involved transporting the laundry machines on pallets from the second-floor laundry room to the roof. We also designed and erected a scaffold platform to enable a goods cage to be landed and lifted by crane.”