Los Alamos National Laboratory has historically been involved with routine handling of a wide variety of hazardous materials. The majority of activities involve nuclear materials in projects ranging from medicinal uses to weapons technology development.The robotics development program at the Laboratory is primarily focused on identifying and automating operations that subject personnel to ionizing radiation, are repetitive, and are subject to human error. Development of automated technology for these operations will help meet national nuclear materials processing demands through the transfer of expertise gained at Los Alamos to other Department of Energy facilities.Robotic equipment that is compatible with glove box environments analytical instrument and in particular LC apparatus does not exist commercially, hence there is a need to design andlor modify systems that can tolerate environments encountered in Special Nuclear Material processing operations. Because of the interaction of atomic fission fragments with the 3093

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Congress enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy (N W P) Act in 1982 as comprehensive legislation for the DOE to locate, build, and operate repositories to permanently dispose of spent nuclear fuel and other high-level wastes. In 1987, Congress amended the N W P Act and authorized the DOE to site, construct, and operate one Monitored Retrievable Storage (M R S) facility. The M R S facility was planned as a means to enhance the flexibility and reliability of the overall waste management system. This white paper presents a broad prospectus of the scientific and regulatory capabilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and outlines the methodology to design and implement an MRS test module. This proposed module will incorporate the flexibility to store all types of spent nuclear fuel above or below

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systems, modify analytical procedures within established limits in order to restore analytical capability and, therefore, maintain productivity [2]. This paper, while reviewing progress in the introduction of robotics in the laboratory, will also illustrate the inclusion of various elements that are beyond the routine sample preparation operation in nature and which includes optimization of analytical conditions and referral to residing experts systems for decisions related to the next best test to perform [3]. It is true that 99% of current robot installations perform routine tasks which could be easily described by decision trees or flow programming. It is also true that robotic installations of the future, or broadly defined as simply the mass-moving component of current robotic systems, will make decisions based on intelligence bases which will involve an almost cybernetic or "clever" decision basis. Attempts to extrapolate current capability into future capability will be made.