Insight: Radiation, risk and robots: Ripping out a reactor's heart

Dismantling a nuclear power plant can take decades and cost up to

MUELHEIM-KAERLICH: As head of the Muelheim-Kaerlich nuclear reactor, Thomas Volmar spends his days plotting how to tear down his workplace. The best way to do that, he says, is to cut out humans. 

About 200 nuclear reactors around the world will be shut down over the next quarter century, mostly in Europe, according to the International Energy Agency. That means a lot of work for the half a dozen companies that specialise in the massively complex and dangerous job of dismantling plants.