Robots Compete In Navigating Simulation Of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Plant 64
schwit1 writes: A new DARPA Robotics Challenge completed its final competition recently. 25 teams operated robots around a landscape designed to simulate the hazardous environment that aid workers found after the Fukushima Daiichi reactor in Japan melted down multiple times in 2011. Engineers tried to help, but disaster ensued, rendering a huge area around the plant uninhabitable after toxic steam was released into the skies. The radioactive leftovers are still emitting a million watts of heat. First prize is $2m, second prize is $1m, and third gets $500,000.
Or we could just deal with the problem cheaply (Score:1, Funny)
Send the most worthless and despicable members of society into deal with the problem.
Politicians, lawyers, CEOs, Priests, Psychiatrists, priests, and the like.
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And he forgot bankers. His psychologist (which he also forgot) knows what's going on.
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Send the most worthless and despicable members of society into deal with the problem
Politicians, lawyers, CEOs, Priests, Psychiatrists, priests, and the like
Excellent idea, no need to waste finely-engineered, highly valuable hi-tec robots - but your list forgot to include marketing morons, advertising "creatives", financial trader types, property speculators, environmental polluters, all other kinds of greedy, self-centered, planet-wrecking ignoramuses, and of course telephone sanitizers ......
Re:Or we could just deal with the problem cheaply (Score:4, Insightful)
telephone sanitizers
Those produce something useful.
Sorry - you are of course, quite right. I have indeed enjoyed having my telephone sanitized, by a specialist with the proper tools, on numerous occasions.
But their inclusion on the list was obligatory really - it's a B-Ark thing :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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A million watts zig heat in Dec 2013 (Score:3, Interesting)
It went from 169 MW to 1 MW in 30 months. We are about 18 months past Dec 2013 so if the reduction is about the same we have approximately 10 kW of heat.
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As I understand it, most of the current day heat is from isotopes that have half lives of a few decades. So the rate of decline should have slowed down a lot.
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IOW, a megawatt isn't really a big deal, people.
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1600 square meters (40x40) sounds big to me. Either that or your back yard isn't getting a megawatt of sunshine.
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My "back yard" is a bit over 100,000 square meters. So?
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So? This stupid thread is not about your back yard.
A reactor can only melt down once. (Score:5, Insightful)
after the Fukushima Daiichi reactor in Japan melted down multiple times
Umm...no. Fukushima Daiichi was a station that had multiple reactors (six). Reactor units 1-3 suffered individual meltdowns, and unit 4 suffered a fire due to cooling water loss in the storage pond. Units 5 and 6 were damaged but were already in cold shutdown when the tsunami occurred.
Re: A reactor can only melt down once. (Score:2)
Most of the cores just shat on the ground but there were a few explosions. Still lots of radioactivity to go around. Permanent dead zone.
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Units 1 and 3 suffered explosions due to hydrogen gas created when zirconium alloys react with water at high temperature (i.e. during a meltdown). Unit 2's building was ventilated to prevent it exploding as well.
Fukushima really is an ongoing disaster. The disposition of the cores is not clear because they are in heavily damaged containments that have insane hot zones in them. They really don't know if these cores are stable yet or not, of if they will remain stable once they get there. All they can do is k
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Wrong.
Both suffered reactor meltdown, both suffered 'explosive loss'
Comparison of Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear accidents [wikipedia.org]
Fukushima got lucky, the wind was blowing out to sea and 80% of the radiation due to the explosions went out to sea.
Tepco lied continually, it took years for real facts to come out.
Re:A reactor can only melt down once. (Score:4, Insightful)
Tepco lied continually, it took years for real facts to come out.
The way you say this, I feel, is a bit mild. A more accurate thing to say was that Everything Tepco Said Was A Lie. They lied about radiation exposure and release every single time they said anything. They did not make one single statement in good faith. They did not operate the plant in good faith. All the Tepco execs should be up against the wall.
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Nonetheless, nobody died, nobody got even slightly sick (a few minor burns) and apart from the immediate vicinity of the reactors (as in, right up against the containment vessels) the area had lower background radioactivity than the Yorkshire Dales or Denver or downtown Helsinki even before the cleanup crews went in. The dangers of radioactivity are so vastly overblown it's difficult to have a sensible conversation about actual real world risk factors because everyone's terrified of it (yet they think nothi
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Watch out when we invent artificial intelligence (Score:5, Funny)
It'd have been nice to know (Score:2)
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Man, you did battlebots, and they still haven't contacted you? I mean, that totally proves your qualifications.
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The reply about breaking walls of text into paragraphs is worth noting, especially in these days of soundbite culture and bloody tablet devices :-)
But your basic point is sound IMO. We have a serious energy supply problem: we cannot continue burning fossil fuels. Quite apart from the putative impact on the global-warming problem, fossil fuels are a dead-end road - we don't have very much left. Coal takes 400 million years to form (IIRC), and oil even longer. It's not just boiling water - pretty much eve
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Coal in large quantities will likely never form again. White fungus evolved and now efficiently eats the huge amounts of plant matter required to make coal.
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we are activating very slow bombs which will (virtually) never be deactivated (by the way, I guess that this is what your video is about. Unfortunately, the link does not work).
The film keeps being uploaded to Youtube, and then removed again by YT because of a copyright complaint. Many people feel strongly anough that the film should be seen that they keep re-uploading it, and so the silly battle goes on.
When you start a single nuclear power plan, you are triggering a set of consequences which the Earth and the future generations will be bearing no matter what during the next quite a few thousands of years.
Agreed.
The film is superb, and will likely leave you quiet and thoughtfuil for days afterwards (though perhaps you already know about it). The Onkalo project is ongoing, and won't be completed till most of us are dead - it consists of the construction in Finland of an undergroun
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"nuclear energy is the door which we shouldn't ever have opened but which, once done, we cannot close."
Really? Look up LFTRs sometime.
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"nuclear technology is highly dangerous, and utterly filthy (certainly for fission) "
Uranium-based nuclear technology is, on a number of levels - but Coal is several hundred thousand times _more_ dangerous, on a deaths per Terawatt/hr basis and burning coal releases at least as much radioactive material (mostly radium) into the atmosphere each year as several chernobyls, but noone cares about that like noone cares that they're several times more likely to die on the way to the airport than in a plane crash.
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"- There is no practical way to replace nuclear power plants within the medium term (not even long term)."
Agreed, however there are practical replacements which are somewhat safer.
Mixing high pressure (20-30 bar or more), high temperature (400-600C) borated water (ie, corrosive) and nuclear fuel rods is such a fundamentally bad idea that I'm still surprised anyone allowed it in the first place - or continues to allow it. Even Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg would be speechless (fuel rods are routinely corro
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And 4th place.. (Score:1)
You can't send electronics into that environment (Score:5, Insightful)
Any system is going to have to be pneumatic and fiber optic in nature. Electronics fail in high radiation environments.
Every robot we've sent in there breaks in minutes if not seconds.
If your motors are all pneumatic actuators like what you see with big dog, then they won't fail when subjected to that kind of radiation.
Your only issue will be getting information from the robot to your command station so you can see what is going on. And the solution there is to use fiber optics. The fiber optics will transmit light into the reactor from the robot and other fiber optics will put up the reflected light to be processed by the command station.
Possibly SOME electronics that are VERY simple will work in a high radiation environment. But nothing complicated has survived. The whole push to miniaturize stuff is counter productive when dealing with radiation.
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Absolutely, positively *NOT* true! If that WERE true, we wouldn't have satellites flying around in and through the Van Allen RADIATION Belts, surviving solar wind storms, and so on! What do you think the reactors rely on internally when they're operating? Radiation-hardened electronics feeding to non-hardened electronics on the outside, that's what.
At the very worst, you can always go back to vacuum tubes (that's "valves" in the Queen's English) which, by definition, are rad-hard.
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I'm baffled as to why we've not as yet built a single robot that can do that and survive in one of these reactors. They've all broken.
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"I'm baffled as to why we've not as yet built a single robot that can do that and survive in one of these reactors. They've all broken."
Let me know when you have a robot that can handle Hot (60C+) wet (steam and water) acidic (did I mention the water is borated?) environments with lots of sharp edges (broken stuff, jagged metal, etc) and uneven surfaces full of things which just _love_ to snag trailing cables.
Oh, and you're required to pick up what's essentially a powder (uranium and plutonium oxide for
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bah: Zirconium fuel rod CLADDING. It's only a few 10ths of a millimeter thick at the best of times.
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Vacuum tubes are more susceptible to radiation errors than solid state units. When you add additional ionization trails into the ions jumping from plate to plate the tube does not work as planned. You can test this yourself if you hold a decent gamma source up to the side of the photomultiplier tube in a scintillation detector. No, the sensing element in an alpha counter isn't effected by gama flux, but the gas in the photomultiplier sure is.
I high gamma flux caused degradation in semiconductors. Satell
Wanted: A Tentacle that goes up to 'Eleven' (Score:2)
We don't need to gollump across the desert slinging a rifle Mad Max style. We don't need expressive faces. We don't need stair climber ballet dancers. We don't need batteries. We need not rely on radio controlled operation. We don't need autonomous operation. We just need to lean around corners, extend and hook onto things, retract to pull ourselves along and extend again to get a camera and radiation monitor on a swivel close enough to far corners to answer the most pressing questions. A tentacle with two
A Korean team won (Score:2)
By the time the submission got published here the competition was already over. A South Korean team won [nytimes.com].
Read the fineprint... (Score:1)
There are bigger problems!!! (Score:1)