Slashdot Mirror
Robots Enter Fukushima Reactor Building
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."
I continue to conclude: It's not Chernobyl. When all this began I said a worst case would be one or more Tsar Bomba equivalents. We now know it is far less than that. It does not appear that the entire mess will equal one Chernobyl.
There will probably be a greater and more fatal impact: the rejection, in the West, of nuclear power, which will either have dire economic consequences and lead to even more transfer of wealth into the sovereign investment funds of the Near East, or possibly to wars: I point out that our Middle East Wars have been deadly; nuclear power has not directly killed anyone in the United States. There are debates about "extra" cancer cases caused by nuclear power, but I know of no proof that there have been any.
Note that China is not going to halt nuclear power construction. The major effect of Fukushima Daiichi may well be a very great Chinese comparative advantage. Cheap easily available energy and freedom are the keys to economic prosperity: the Chinese are moving toward both. The United States is moving away from both. The results are predictable.
Meanwhile, there is no sign of any danger to anyone outside the evacuation zone in Japan, and indeed not much evidence of danger inside it. Japan will be deprived of some rice farming land for a few years -- perhaps -- and of the energy from the plant. Of course the plant was older and scheduled for retirement to begin with.
The 9.0 earthquake is now said to have been the largest ever recorded to have hit a civilized area.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I object to letting our robotic overlords have control of nuclear material.
Thanks to Google. Once they find out that long term disability and on-the-job life insurance does not extend to robots. This will be just one of many stepping stones to the robot uprising, mark my words!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
With all the stories of robots invented by Japanese over time, I am surprised they weren't doing this on day 2 after the event. I just assumed that if they were inventing sex robots and elder-care robots and dancing robots which all do things which humans could already do pretty well, that they had run out of things humans couldn't do, like industrial robots and disaster explorer robots. I've lost a lot of respect for Japanese robotics after the length of this delay.
Allow me to be the first to say, "domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!"
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
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???
"My God! It's full of stars!"
I'm not even pro-nuclear (I'd call it the lesser of two evils), and even I take exception to the assumption that the realists about Fukushima (or Chernobyl for that matter) must be nuclear industry shills.
There is a general trend of alarmist hysteria surrounding nuclear power, and slashdot is one of the few places I read where there are people basically telling the alarmists to stow it. A few of these people shouting down the anti-nuclear sentiment are strongly biased in favour of nuclear power, but most are simply more informed about the risks involved than the general public. Dismissing the anti-alarmist commentators as "nuclear industry PR folks" is essentially throwing reason out the window in favour of fear.
(Just to preempt the inevitable accusation that I am "one of them", my own view is that nuclear power plants should be built in lieu of coal power plants. See the "lesser of two evils" sentiment above. I'm all in favour of solar homes and where local conditions permit I support hydro, geothermal or other means of power collection. In the long run I think fusion offers our best hope. Nuclear power is a stopgap.)
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
PS WTF Japan, you're only NOW starting to use robots help fix the reactor???
Why bother, when genpatsu gypsies are so much cheaper?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Great, if they are like my Roomba they will bounce from one wall to another in the corner, scream loudly, and then shutdown.
"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.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
The media is getting this material here. You can find video of RC helicopter flights over the buildings, video of the No.4 spend fuel pool sampling operation right down to the surface of the water, photos of the tsunami water marks on the turbine and reactor buildings and photos of the destruction of outlying structures. Also interesting are photos of the emergency staff and their on-site facilities. Much of this stuff is high resolution photography.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Hey flesh bags, bite my shiny metal radioactive a.....
Oh Fukushima, not Futurama..... Sorry my bad...
Geothermal is also nuclear power. It relies on the intrinsic fission of elements within the Earth's mantle, and legacy heat from prior fission as well as legacy friction from planetary formation. It's implemented by steam turbines also, or turbines driven by the flash evaporation of some other coolant.
The difference betweent fission, fusion and geothermal is that geothermal requires no fuel creation or elimination. You dig two deep holes fairly close together and force water down one of them. The heat of the Earth heats the water, which comes up the other hole - usually as steam or superheated water that will become steam when the pressure is released, but sometimes just as much hotter water. Naturally after the energy gained is tapped, the hot water is then re-injected. For new water some use sewage effluent and solve two problems at once. There is no ash, no spent fuel to rot in casks 100,000 years under close supervision of a non-proliferation task force. There are no mining deaths because there's no mine. There are no refining risks because there's no refining. There's no proliferation risk because there's no nuclear products onsite. The cost of dealing with the emissions are well understood because there aren't any. Geothermal plants require a much smaller geographic footprint than even nuclear plants, because they can mine energy from several miles in each direction and there is no risk.
With geothermal power in the event of a disaster of the worst possible sort: a Geothermal plant is simultaneously attacked by terrorists, crushed by a 10.3 earthquake and inundated by the subsequent 90m tsunami at the exact moment that a Justin Bieber album goes platinum, the worst that can happen is that some steam will vent and electricity will stop being generated, and Justin Bieber gets a slot on Dancing With the Stars. That's not a lot of downside risk, relative to fission and fusion.
There are established economies on Earth that can't provide 100% of their electrical energy needs from geothermal sources. Some parts of Africa, the US East Coast, Brazil. Japan, though? Yes, they could. Their entire nation is a chain of active volcanos. They are geothermal rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Actually, thus far every design type of theoretical fusion plant would necessarily create radioactive waste, although not as much of it as fission plants. The reason is the same one that the waste-water in the original article is a problem: nuclear reactions work by massive cascades of nutrons randomly hitting atoms in the core. When those nutrons hit the nucleus of an atom (in a way that causes them to be absorbed in the right way), then you get your nuclear reaction, and that in turn produces more neutrons as ersatz-billiard-balls to continue your reaction, plus energy (in the form of heat) that you harvest off (usually with water) to convert into your power-transmission method of choice (usually electricity).
The problem in all of this is that you can't just limit it to your fuel and your energy harvester (water), you wind up with lots of other elements in the reaction chamber that also get bombarded with neutrons. And some percentage of those elements are going to wind up transmuting into radioactive waste.
In the case of a fusion reactor that is probably going to be whatever serves as the reaction chamber wall. Remember, neutrons are magnetically/electrically neutral particles, so you can't contain them using magnets, so you just have to let your reactor wall take the hits, and slowly degrade into radioactive waste. No one has a solution to this problem, and it is unlikely that one exists.
So, there really is no pedantic to call out here. Nuclear energy produces nuclear waste, the only question is how much (vs. the extracted energy), and how bad the byproducts will be.
"Banri Kaieda spoke to reporters on Sunday shortly after Tokyo Electric Power Company presented a road map to cool down the reactors and significantly reduce radiation leaks in 6 to 9 months" http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/17_16.html It's only 6 to 9 months no big deal right? "Radiation levels measured between the double doors of those reactor buildings was 270 millisieverts in the Number One reactor, 12 in Number 2, and 10 in Number 3. The radiation level detected at the Number One reactor exceeds the national exposure limit of 250 millisieverts for nuclear contract workers." http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/18_03.html Three reactors melting down and at least one breached , plus several tons of waste fuels rods that have melted or blown away and are still currently boiling off, plutonium found around the plant on the ground , not to mention the dumping of highly radioactive water into the ocean for over a month but no big deal right? http://www.vgb.org/vgbmultimedia/News/Fukushimav15VGB.pdf If you have a mind to look behind the curtain http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread672665/pg739
Except that there is in fact a lot of nuclear astroturfing going on.
How is it astroturfing if they are a) a group specifically and publicly formed by and for the nuclear industry, b) not hiding who they are, but openly and honestly giving their side of the debate, c) to an audience that is there specifically to hear what they have to say because they WANT to hear what they have to say?
Sorry, but that's just silly. It's kinda like saying the catholic church astroturfs every time a priest stands up and gives a sermon.
"Well Artoo, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into"
Obligatory Useful links: A very good description of radiation by the EPA
http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/index.html
Follow the link under the green heading at the right of the page
"...there is no sign of any danger to anyone outside the evacuation zone in Japan"
This is truly hilarious. Words delivered with the same sincerity as those uttered by representatives of the cigarette industry back in the 1950's.
Pournelle cleverly avoids comment on the Japanese workers who are now dying a slow death as a result of their efforts to deal with the problem and obviously Jerry cannot wait to see exactly just what problems might emerge from the 9 month project to seal the reactor.
The fact that there is need for an evacuation zone at all should wake dear old Pournelle up to the problem, but he is too old and set in his ways.
After the Chernobyl accident, the team that had created the Lunokhod rovers was asked to build remote-controlled vehicles (RCV) to help clean up. The RCV's first task was to remove reactor debris (chunks of graphite from the core) from a roof, by pushing it off the edge of the roof. The RCVs worked well; eventually though they failed due to the radiation. This despite them being rad-hardened, as the original Lunokhods had been powered by an RTG.
I predict the rates of deaths from Cancer in Japan will not increase but rather drop off, as ppl will now be more aware of a risk, and more likely to follow though on it!
Treatments will be made cheaper and more widely available, and thus a much lower death rate the other parts of the 1st world!
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
There is one serious problem with sending robots there.
All the old BOFH jokes about cosmic rays? It's all true in there.
High radiation levels make bits skip like crazy in high-density memory and CPUs. Your parrot drone's firmware would crash within a mile of the power plant, unless you shield the CPU with enough lead so that it would never take off.
Then try to drive that remotely. The name "radioactivity" is not there in vain. It really creates horrible noise in all radio frequencies, so forget "fly by radio" models. Either it's autonomous, or driven by cable, or you set up a goddamned 100KW radio tower for driving your drone to overcome all the noise.
And then you got a ground drone with all electronics shielded by an inch of lead, driven by a mile long spool of cable unwound from a roll on the back. Now give it a camera that can still see the outside and won't crash due to radiation - possibly analog, with only the CCD exposed, and in such a way that radiation won't pass inside bypassing the lenses. Give it a manipulator arm that has all electronics shielded. Give it a battery that will be able to drive the half a ton of lead, 100kg of wire, and another half a ton of hardware of the device - forget your fancy micro engines, every exposed part must be thick rugged so that electric noise doesn't affect it. Make sure it's radiation-leak proof, because even a small hole in the shield may crash the software.
And now build it. How long will it take you to do it?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Meanwhile I object to calling the guys that say "the roof won't blow off" etc etc "realists".
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 is a scary case. It has both an ambitious nuclear plan and a long history of geological instability which shows no signs of abating. It is also a culture where corruption is rife and taken for granted, which does not bode well for the prospects of a safe nuclear implementation. Given this cocktail of factors, it's probably not unfair to say that Indonesia truly is "backward".
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.
the greanpeace number is claimed to be a additional deaths to due cancer, not all cancer cases. Their pessimisc view is that this number can rise to 200.000.
Not that that really matters now, because it impossible now to reverse what happened in chernobyl 1986.
One thing is for sure: the "Don' panic" numbers released by authorities are only one hlaf of the truth.
First - I'm "old enough" to have seen patterns myself. Feel free to get off my lawn any time.
Second - "large corporations" is a strawman argument - unless you can give me a single example of any large scale example of ANY energy generator that is *not* a "large corporation"? That's where the regulatory framework comes in.
Third - There are probably more people that die in just West Virginia each year than have died IN TOTAL due to nuclear accidents. Hint: mining disasters aren't even close to being the worst offender - take a look at the stats regarding cancers, black lung, silicosis and other diseases caused by long-term exposure to coal dust in the mines.
Forth - when has anybody, anywhere, described fission as a free lunch? All systems and technologies have their costs. As somebody commented earlier, nuclear energy right now is just one of the best of a bunch of bad options.
This is typical and normal for Japanese companies not to be forthcoming with information. They simply don't offer information unless it is required. You might consider this "secretive" especially when such an event literally has potential to affect everyone on the planet in some way, but this is simply not inherent to the way the Japanese think. This is an embarrassment and simply would prefer not to talk about it. I think this trend is clear and obvious from the very beginning of the reporting of the situation. The picture painted was always one indicating "nothing to worry about" and so on. As things progressed, they had to "admit" more failure as it couldn't be denied.
In the western mind, this does the opposite of "building trust" and is read as being deceptive. Even now, I cannot help but feel that way. But I have to remind myself that this is "normal" for this different cultural mindset. Then ask yourself why would they do anything that wouldn't be normal for them to do? They don't read this as a "public trust" issue -- they see it as an internal affair.
I continue to conclude: It's not Chernobyl. When all this began I said a worst case would be one or more Tsar Bomba equivalents. We now know it is far less than that. It does not appear that the entire mess will equal one Chernobyl.
Rubbish, Tsar Bomba's fall out is measured in kilograms, Chernobyls around 10's of tons. Due to the spent fuel pools there is approximately 30-40 years worth of spent fuel at Fukushima and we could be looking at around 800-1000 tons of plutonium assuming a 10 year refueling cycle. Great that it didn't blow up however the release of radionuclides will continue to occur until all the leaks are repaired. The question is how this will be achieved. Chernobyl released it's radionuclides into the air and all over the land because it was land locked. It seems that because Fukushima is releasing its radionuclide yield into the ocean that this is somehow less concerning. Let's do and see the science and asses the actual damage based on that, not hyperbole.
There are debates about "extra" cancer cases caused by nuclear power, but I know of no proof that there have been any.
The claim can be made for two reasons. First at TMI the science wasn't even done. Dr Carl Johnson, an expert in radiation related diseases asked the NRC and DOE to do a survey to look for some of these elements in the respirable dust around TMI after the accident and they refused. So if the authorities *refused* to take measurements on which to base long term cancer studies can be based, how can a supposition be made about how many lives have been lost due to increased cancer rates?
It can be best summed up by this 2004 quote of Dr Michael Fernex formerly of the University of Basel who worked for the WHO;
"Six years ago we tried to have a conference. The proceedings were never published. This is because in this matter the organisations at the UN are subordinate to the IAEA. Since 1986 the WHO did nothing about studying Chernobyl. It's a pity. The interdiction to publish which fell upon the WHO conference came from the IAEA. The IAEA blocked the proceedings; the truth would have been a disaster for the nuclear industry"
Here is the actual text of the agreement. However the UNICEF report "Human consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident" summarised it neatly;
"Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less that Sri Lanka, which is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and is in the middle of a long drawn out war"
Maybe Pournelle is just to lazy to look and since cancer takes years to gestate I think it's premature to understand the damage done to the Japanese populace by Fukushima.
the Chinese are moving toward both. The United States is moving away from both. The results are predictable.
Absolutely predicable. If they make the same tragic organisational mistakes that every other country has made then we will see an accident on the same scale. It's difficult to believe that the Chinese will succeed where the UK, USA, USSR, Germany and now Japan has failed.
Of course the plant was older and scheduled for retirement to begin with.
Of course this is completely irrelevant and actually should have promoted investment in *ensuring* the plant wouldn't fail. The activated isotopes inside the reactor, or CRUD (Chalk River Unidentified Deposits - look it up), will be leaking into the Pacific if the reactor vessel is as breached as it appears to be. I suspect we are just at the
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
In Chernobyl, the "released" radioactive material spread all over Europe and Asia. In Fukushima, the "released" material is mostly still on the power plant site.
Contaminated water is a pain to keep bottled up, but it's a lot easier than contaminated smoke.
So that 1/8 figure, while accurate, is misleading about the effects on the population.
Fusion researchers have done an excellent job in pushing their lies and PR so as to continue receiving funding but it would literally be a miracle to have fusion power plants running in less than a couple hundred years; with five to six hundred years being far more realistic.
Wow, a prophet right here on /.!
I'd really like to know which orifice you pulled your numbers from? We are possibly at the edge of the AI singularity, meaning soon we might build a computer smart enough to build a smarter computer. It's a fairly short track from there to IQ 10,000. I strongly suspect such an AI would have very little trouble designing a working fusion reactor. This will likely all happen well within 100 years, possibly within the next twenty years.
Even ignoring the possibility of a singularity, mere humans could well invent a working fusion reactor in the near term. Advances in science and technology aren't very predictable. Let me give you a few examples:
Given that even Einstein was dead wrong in some of his predictions, I don't have a lot of faith in what you're saying here... ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
However the UNICEF report "Human consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident" summarised it neatly;
"Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less that Sri Lanka, which is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and is in the middle of a long drawn out war"
Deceptive quoting makes the report seem to imply that the low life expectancy is due to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident whereas the report actually says something else:
"As is true throughout the Former Soviet Union, life expectancy is low not only as compared with Southern and Western Europe, North America and Japan, but also with a number of countries from the developing world. Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less than in Sri Lanka, which is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and is in the middle of a long drawn out war. Overwhelmingly the most important reason for this is the combination of poverty, poor diet and living conditions, and lifestyle factors such as tobacco and alcohol use. These factors may also, to some degree, be reinforced in the affected areas and communities by the psychosocial effects of the accident. Cardiovascular disease and trauma (accidents and poisonings) are the two most common causes of death followed by cancer (this situation is not confined to the Chernobyl affected regions). Most doctors when asked what measures would most improve the health of the population said improved diet and living conditions."
"Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
So please, keep your ignorance to yourself.
Amusingly, that's precisely what I was telling you.
It's also quite funny that you're claiming "physicist" (sic) support your view, when the person who discovered the principle that makes fission possible (Einstein) was dead wrong about its practicality. He didn't think it would ever work, not even claiming it would take hundreds of years. He was proven wrong within ten years.
Once again (and I hope it sinks in this time) technology predictions are hard, and many extremely smart people have been burned making them. I'll laugh thinking of this thread if I hear of the first net energy producing fusion reactor going live. It may not happen, but I'm not stupid enough to make a prediction one way or the other. ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait