Robots Enter Fukushima Reactor Building 244
swandives writes "For the first time, a pair of remote controlled robots have entered a reactor building at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power hopes the iRobot Packbots will be able to provide data on the current condition inside the buildings, although the company hasn't yet released any information on what they found inside."
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:iRobots? (Score:2, Interesting)
iRobot has been building robots for years with no problems with the name.
It is substantially different from crApple products by the fact iRobot products are actually useful rather than shiny technology, and substantially different from Asimov's titicular story, 'I, Robot' in the fact that (a) iRobot's are not 3 laws safe, and (b) it doesn't use 'I, ' but rather 'i' and (c) the company in Asimov's stories is US Robotics which shares the name with another company that you may have used back in the dialup days www.usr.com
I have one of the iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaners and hope that there will be future technological advances that allow me to continue on my goal to the state of being a lazy fat c*nt.
PS WTF Japan, you're only NOW starting to use robots help fix the reactor???
Re:iRobots? (Score:1, Interesting)
Isn't the real 'WTF' here: 'Japan, you're using AMERICAN robots to help assess and/or fix the reactor!?!?!'
Somewhere deep in a bunker under Siberia, an irony alarm is going off.
Re:Oh, a nuclear energy thread. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Nuclear power" in the vernacular sense means "power generating fission reactors". Mostly because those are the only tech presently used to harness nuclear reactions for electricity. Informally, virtually every member of the public hears "nuclear" and understands it to mean "fission", assuming they know what fission is.
I am aware that a hypothetical fusion power plant would "nuclear" in the sense of the word used by physicists, however I do not generally refer to them as "nuclear power plants" to avoid confusion. When precision in language gets in the way of clarity, clarity should always come first; being correctly understood matters more than being technically correct when dealing with non-experts.
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually the fact that the earthquake occurred so close to the shore probably SAVED lives in the end. In the Indian ocean quake, most of the affected areas never actually felt the quake, all they saw was the water receding then a giant wave. Most had no chance to escape. At least in Japan the fact that the quake was so powerful gave an unmistakable warning to the people living near the coast to get to high ground. The closeness of the earthquake to the shore probably ended up saving, not costing, lives.
Radiation for 6-9 months (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:5, Interesting)
Conservative estimates (Areva) point to at least 60% meltdown in three cores, mobilization of about half the cores' inventory of solubles and of essentially all gases.
That's way more material than a Tsar Bomba or three (remember, the Tsar Bomba was high-altitude, 90-something % fusion yield). I'm not even counting the three cooling pools with unknown amounts of water in them which are steaming and outgassing in the open.
Is it more than Chernobyl? Certainly not, in terms of heavy metals and activated carbon released, so the long-term effects (heavy metal toxicity, mostly) will not be as pronounced.
I see, howewver, an estimation of 1T Bq/hr being released. That's definitely going somewhere and with the monsoon season starting, that somewhere is the southwest of Japan (Kanto will be hardest hit, if this is a regular monsoon).
I have reason to believe that additional cancers, birth defects and miscarriages over the next 30-50 years or so will not be correctly reported, nor, indeed, correctly attributed should they be detected. Even simple facts such as radiation measurements are being withheld or obfuscated.
Also, you yourself are spreading untruths. The plant was on an approved 10 year life-extension that had just started. The earthquake was definitely not the biggest earthquake ever and its magnitude at Fukushima was even lower than that, because of distance from the epicenter mainly.
The #2 reactor is cracked. That could not have happened because of the tsunami (not enough energy), nor can it be because of the hydrogen explosion ("wrong" blast pattern). That leaves only one culprit - the earthquake itself, which indeed exceeded the puny 7.5 Richter design maximum.
There is now talk (from TEPCO) of flooding the reactor buildings. They are not designed to hold water in the first place. They are already compromised, structurally, by a massive earthquake, two aftershocks and an explosion each. Will they hold if another quake comes?
No need to answer that, of course. Just go back to your dreams of "energy too cheap to meter".
Re:Oh, a nuclear energy thread. (Score:5, Interesting)
As I see it one of the biggest problems is the expectation of 100% zealous fanboy behaviour or you are out. Suggest a thorium solution on the ground of increased safety? Out the door you go, distinguished career over with the successful project cancelled. Suggest a brilliant way to very cheaply chemically incorporate everything in high grade waste in a stable material? There is no waste problem screams the fanboys - you cannot have your dismal amount of funding so it's going to take you three decades to put the finishing touches on.
Once nuclear power became a way to funnel huge amounts of money from the taxpayers it ceased to be anything other than an excuse for that transfer so it was technologically finished in the USA. What Westinghouse would sell you before Toshiba got involved was little more than TMI painted green. Now it's currently not much better. Meanwhile South Africa has more advanced civilian nuclear technology - derived from that via Germany is the pebble bed reactor in China. India is way ahead. France for all it's troubles and the dead end of plutonium fast breeders and pointless reprocessing is well ahead.
Meanwhile in the USA it's just a cheer squad that pretends it is all perfect and it's rare that some improvement sneaks in from elsewhere (eg. the Toshiba stuff that inspired the AP1000). It's been a dead industry in the USA since even before Carter told them they had to survive on their own merits.
Indonesia... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:2, Interesting)
Nuclear is far cheaper per megawatt than anything else built to date.
on Average /Salt Plants = 10-15 Solar/electric fields = 2000 wind turbines.
1 nuclear plant = 2-3 coal plants = 2-3 hydro turbines = 8-10 Solar
note how the green energy requires land areas 3 times that of chernobyl for equal energy output.
* based roughly on the largest output of the various power plants.
considering that 90% of the population is fighting large scale deployment wind and solar so that they don't hurt the "view" from their properties. Nuclear is going to continue to remain the best bang for the buck.
Re:Oh, a nuclear energy thread. (Score:3, Interesting)
The plasma facing first wall and structural materials of fusion plants are being designed to minimise the generation of long lived radiative elements (search for IFMIF for info on the planned materials test facility). Over the lifetime of a fusion plant you'd end up with barely enough high level waste to put into a small oil drum - this can then be destroyed. People seem to forget that you can use the huge neutron flux of a fusion reactor to transmute materials, ie you can convert dangerous radioactive waste into much more benign waste. It would require a dedicated plant, but this would be no problem in a fusion economy.