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A SPECIALLY DESIGNED robot built to go down into the melted reactor of the Fukushima nuclear plant has stalled just hours into its mission.
The robot recorded enough data to indicate that there is a path deeper down into reactor.
That’s good news for experts designing a robot for a future mission aimed at locating and investigating the residue of the nuclear fuel that melted in the 2011 disaster.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the robot stalled after completing about two-thirds of its planned mission Friday inside the Unit 1 containment vessel.
TEPCO spokesman Teruaki Kobayashi said the robot collected temperature and radiation data and images from parts of the platform around the area known as the pedestal below the bottom of the reactor core before it became stuck and unrecoverable. The robot had been intended for only one use because of the high radiation levels.
A second robot mission scheduled for yesterday was postponed while engineers investigate the cause of the stalling. Kobayashi said the robot’s treads may have become stuck on a grating or in a gap as it moved.
The 60cm long, snake-shaped robot entered the containment chamber through a pipe and transformed into a U-shape crawler after it landed on the platform.
A 2.5 minute edited compilation of images transmitted by the robot showed steam wafting from inside the dark container, lit by a lamp mounted on the robot, as it slowly maneuvered around debris that looked like small rocks and metal parts. The images contained numerous white dots believed to be caused by gamma rays.
Kobayashi said the test also showed the robot tolerated radiation and that the levels were significantly lower than anticipated.
That means robots can last longer and some wireless devices may even be usable, although the radiation levels were way too high for humans to enter the area, even wearing protective gear.
The radiation levels can be seen at the bottom of the video and at one point reached up to 10 sieverts per hour, a level that would be fatal to humans.
Without more data, it will be difficult to figure out exactly how to safely locate and remove the radioactive debris. Nuclear officials are expected to revise the plant’s decades-long decommissioning roadmap in the coming weeks, with more leeway and options in case earlier plans prove unfeasible.
TEPCO plans to send in a different, amphibious robot next year for a further investigation of the triple meltdown that followed the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Computer simulations and cosmic ray examinations have shown that almost all fuel rods in the Unit 1 reactor melted, breached the core and fell to the bottom of the containment chamber.
Because of the damage to the reactors, large volumes of cooling water continue to leak from them, causing contamination and hampering the plant’s cleanup process.
- With reporting from Rónán Duffy
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Could the robot survive in the Guinness Storehouse toilets ?
hey
Boo
At one stage the counter jumped to almost 25 sieverts per hour. The safe dose for human absorption is 0.02 sieverts per year or 0.000002 sieverts per hour. The elephants foot in the sarcophagus in Chernobyl emits 94 sieverts per hour.
There’s an elephants foot in a sarcophagus?
Really?
Little jim, it’s solidified Uranium and other fission fragments. It poured down through the reactor into the sarcophagus. It looks like an elephants foot. That’s where the name was coined.
Put on your oil skins. You’ll be fine ted
Love it u really think that the general journal audience will actually understand how fecked that is. Keep going my equally boring friend! Never let the minions stop these wonderful posts
Eh no the bearing plates under the turbine& granny are round & flat like an elephant scoot hence elephants foot. Which is universal across all power plants with a turbine & genny
Someone put their granny down there?? That’s terrible! / (Okay I know it’s a typo!)
Send Brian from confused.com down there.See how he gets on.
Heard a great comparison to splitting the atom once. Splitting one atom with a grain of sand, which has billions of them, is enough to move the grain of sand. Equivalent to kicking a football off the moon and moving it. Such is the power contained within the atom. Explains how our sun can last so long
Typo” one atom within a grain of sand”
Ohaim, 10kg of Uranium (critical mass used in Hiroshima) releases 900000000000000000 Joules of energy. Think of it this way, drop a 1 Newton object from a height of 1m and that contains a joule of energy. The sun is a fusion reactor, Fukishima was a fission reactor. Fusion is many times more powerful.
Build more nuclear reactors, they said.
It’ll be fine, they said.
Can’t be any worse than what we are doing today. The reckoning is 800,000 per year die from the crap produced from burning coal. It would take a lot of Chernobyls and Fukushimas to come anywhere near.
Can’t be any worse? How long does waste from a nuclear plant stay lethal for again? And what’s our best plan to dispose of nuclear waste these days? Is it still just burying it in a big hole?
I agree coal power plants should be banned but that’s hardly a reason to go nuclear.
@Ross Stewart:
Burying spent nuclear fuel in a hole is a good plan, after all, uranium was dug out of a hole in the first place.
However, burning millions of tons of coal and oil dumps billions of tons of crap into the air we breath.
100′s of thousands of people die each year from atmospheric pollution.
http://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-harmful-than-nuclear-power/
Are the “flickers” a bad camera or the gamma rays?
Only 20C? Be grand down there..
they better be careful with those gamna rays, that’s what got David Banner into all that trouble
No Godzillas roaming around down there then?
Wrong story man, hasn’t been one about coppers in a while…….
@John Quill
It’s a great film.
I keep expecting a facehugger or the Blair witch to appear at the end……..
Where does the turf go?
Ha Robot san says were fecked
No nukes, no nimby windfarms, sure.
Green clean Ireland will just keeps on burning turf and silage wrap then.
Import oil, burn that as well.
And if the wind stops blowing then we can import British and French Nuclear power.
That’s being green, us Irish.
have your say