The significance of Sellafield to West Cumbria has been described in a lot of different ways, but director of RAICo Dr Kirsty Hewitson puts it best: ‘If Sellafield catches a cold, the whole county sneezes’.
This saying is common among businesses doing work in this part of the region, Hewitson explains, with companies acutely aware of how the local supply chain is impacted by developments at the mammoth nuclear facility near Seascale.
The winds can change quickly, but whichever way they blow, the supply chain needs access to opportunities in order to remain robust. One of RAICo's key objectives is engaging the regional supply chain and encouraging this local innovation.
RAICo has a complex and intriguing model. It takes academic research and technologies in robotics and AI systems and transforms them into practical solutions that can be tested and used on operational nuclear decommissioning and fusion engineering sites. This can involve sending robots in to complete tasks that humans can’t, given the health risks of the nuclear environment.
The suffix of the RAICo name is reference to its status as a collaboration: Linked together by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), University of Manchester, AWE Nuclear Security Technologies, and, of course, Sellafield Ltd. Together, the collaboration aims to drive economic growth across Cumbria.
Creating local opportunities comes with logistical and contractual challenges – with RAICo powered by government funding – but Hewitson says it is striving to strengthen the region wherever it can.
‘About 50% of our budget goes into the supply chain,’ Hewitson explains.
‘And we are as supportive of the local supply chain as we possibly can be. [For example], we’re anchor members of the Cumbria Robotics Cluster, where we attend all the meetings, understanding what local supply chain does and how we can support them.
‘For us, it's all about how you actually take the output from RAICo and then ensure that you move the needle on things like cost savings, and whether you can license some of the outputs into the local supply chain and therefore they get an economic return.’
RAICo has worked alongside a wide variety of firms in West Cumbria including Createc, Forth, and CORE Nuclear, and Hewitson says that the makeup of the industry has seen West Cumbria cultivate its own culture of collaboration.
‘People in the robotics area recognise that pooling resource and capability rather than competing against one another is actually the way to go,’ she says.
‘Within West Cumbria there is that community feel. It doesn't always work out right and it's not as though there aren't fallings-out and arguments, but on the whole people at least pick up the phone and try and speak to one another rather than it being a public spat.
‘RAICo tries to fit within the ecosystem to make sure we deliver the benefit that we can, whilst recognising there are people with robotics competency and capability that we absolutely need to tap into.’
Finding those people, however, remains a challenge. Hewitson says that recruiting in the Whitehaven area – where a RAICo facility, RAICo1, is based – is particularly difficult as they are fishing in a small pond for specialists who are often snapped up quick by industry giants such as Amentum. This dilemma has, however, presented a chance for RAICo to double down on its mission to deliver socioeconomic impact.
Hewitson offers an example: ‘If you work at Sellafield, you're generally pretty comfortable as long as you can retain your role, but Whitehaven is in the top 10 per cent of deprived neighbourhoods in the UK.
‘Whilst talent is created equally, opportunities aren't, and yet we're finding we don't have enough skilled people to be able to serve our needs.’
This has prompted RAICo to take a different approach which may begin to resolve the talent problem. Rather than developing a new robotics engineering apprenticeship, it has built robotics modules which slots into existing engineering qualifications.
‘We ended up teaming up with the National College for Nuclear and Clean Energy and they wrote those modules for us,’ Hewitson explains.
‘We then procured £700,000 worth of equipment to enable the teaching. We ran the first pilot across February and March, and it'll be rolled out to apprentices in September.
‘It's probably one of the proudest things I've ever done in my entire life.’
Engaging with young talent is vital for RAICo, and Hewitson is eager to work more closely with the likes of LEVELS: The new immersive education and entertainment centre that is developing digital talent in the old Whittles building on Duke Street in Whitehaven.
‘There must be, what, a 10-minute walk between [RAICo and LEVELS]?’ Hewitson muses.
‘What we're trying to work out is… how can you bring the two closer together?
‘Can we start to do all these super connections, further leveraging and amplifying impact and benefit across our regions?’
Experimenting with these sorts of bold ideas and concepts is all part of a day’s work for Hewitson, but she is conscious of the need to make decisions carefully given RAICo’s status as taxpayer-funded.
‘I'm really aware that I'm funded by the UK taxpayer,’ she says.
‘[We need to] make sure that we spend that money wisely, we don't duplicate efforts, and we leverage as much as possible across all these different programmes.
‘It's all about how we fill in the pieces of the jigsaw to make sure we have that whole solution for how you actually deliver economic value in a place like Cumbria. For that, you need your skills, you need your research, you need your industry. You need all three of those to be within an innovation ecosystem in order to be successful.’
Experimenting with ideas is also necessary, Hewitson says, due to the wider pace of change. She knows that RAICo must keep innovating – and says the rest of Cumbria, and the UK, must take a similar approach to avoid getting left behind.
‘You need to make sure you remain cutting edge yourself – so if you're a local business, how do you make sure that your USP remains a USP?’ she states.
‘If you're a robotics adopter, how do you make sure you're adopting the most relevant solutions?
‘You absolutely have to make sure you have the right cultural mindset within your organisation so that you're open to adopting new tech.
‘It's about recognising that a lot of technology isn't there to take jobs. It's to make sure that you don’t do the dull, dirty, dangerous stuff - tech can do that instead of you - and therefore people are left to do the more interesting aspects of their lives.’
With more advancement on the way, and West Cumbria's businesses so intrinsically linked, collaboration in this part of the world has never been more important.
RAICo continues to help the region connect the dots.
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