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Where Were the Robots In Fukushima Crisis?
mdsolar writes "When the huge Fukushima nuclear disaster first started, many on Slashdot were calling for robots to come to the rescue. This is the story of why our overlords were caught napping. Not to worry though, ¥1 billion has been allocated to correct the robot problem. They will be properly welcomed."
With nuclear accidents being extremely rare there is no point in designing robots specifically for them. Those models would most likely become obsolete without ever being used.
Pride prevented them from acknowledging their weaknesses and thus prevented them from building robots that could go into the bad places that humans have made.
it is pretty typical japanese ignore a potential situation until you are shamed into no longer ignoring it. It is one of the few things that japan does that they are ashamed of but because they are shamed they won't fix it.
American's are alway cleaning up the mess made by others. hopefully one day someone will clean up after us American's
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Some of them were playing violin, while rest enjoyed walking up and down the stairs.
839*929
Nuclear disasters are not the only use case of such robots. Fire-fighting, post-earthquake/terror attack assistance etc. apart from the shielding, not much changes.
But the shielding is important. All your electronics and your sensors will go harvoc there. To get anything working you most likely need totally different designs.
Camaras (both analog and digital) are likely to also 'see' the radiation and thus no longer see anything, and while you can shield the inner core electronics, roboters without sensors or actors do not make much sense.
If you have to deal with high radiation, you either need very special robots. Or you need humans. They will not come back, and they might not last very long, but compared to electronics, they are suprisingly tough on a short enough time scale.
The comments here on /. are focused on why robots were not built in advance. But I am wondering why nothing was done in the days after the disaster.
When I heard about the attempts of cooling from the outside using fire trucks, which failed because the radiation was too high for the personnel, my first thought was:
Mythbusters can make a vehicle remote operated for a weekly TV show. The entire nation of Japan can't make a fire truck remote operated after facing a nuclear disaster?
The most important questions go beyond the robots:
Why did they use a design that was pronounced risky by Rand McNally BEFORE the plant was built?
Why did they build it in an earthquake zone and in a zone vulnerable to tsunamis?
I bet a lot of of Japanese business men would love for the focus to stay on some technical failures with the robots.
Noah was probably a dude on a raft with a couple of goats, and some writer seriously blew that shit out of proportion.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
For a dyslexic, nuclear is unclear.
I tend to consider this as very stupid, as the dangers clearly outweigh any benefit, but I'll post this idea for the sake of protecting the heroes that have to give their lives because the idiot weasels first lied to get power and then betrayed their voters by choosing the alternative that is unsafe.
The dangers associated with nuclear power are very much analogous to flying in an airplane vs. driving a car for a long trip. Statistically speaking you're more likely to have a car acident than a plane crash. Likewise more people die every year from car acidents than plane crashes.
That said a car crash has a lot lower fatality rate than plane crashes, plenty of people walk away relatively unscathed from a car crash, and even if they don't a car crash has the potential to kill maybe a dozen people if it's really bad. On the other hand a plane crash is almost certainly fatal (assuming the plane got off of the runway), and given that most passanger carry a hundred people or more, a plane crash is a much more serious event for those involved.
There are plenty of unpublished deaths associated with coal or oil power (the primary alternatives to nuclear), mining accidents etc. (not to mention the untabulated costs of pollution and environmental damage) Compared to what, 3 major nuclear events over the past 60 years, each of which had it's costs in life and environmental damages.
The Point is that while each has it's costs in human life and damage to the environment, nuclear power generally has more devastating accidents that happen rarely, while coal and oil have much less devastating accidents that I'd wager happen much more frequently than most people are aware of (I'd even bet the total cost in human lives to be proportionally higher for coal and oil, adjusted for percentage of total power provided of course)
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Likely to "see the radiation"? How about reading up on the spectrum emitted. As for analog cameras — are saying there are robots that use film cameras as visual sensors? If radiation is jamming the electronics then the human sent in that environment will fry on the spot in the matter of minutes. Simple as that.
Under high radiation, even oils like lubricants and hydraulic liquids can go bad very quickly. You can imagine your car running with gunk instead of oil.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
It also doesn't matter that you use photoelectrical chemicals, like our eyes.
You are overestimating the problem radiation causes to a sensor. You can deal with it with some good averaging, like is applied on our eyes, or you can use more complex techiniques that will give even better results.
Now, the problem of radiation destroing the sensor is a big one. For solving that you'd even need specialized semiconductor fabrics. With some redundancy and shielding you can make they last longer, maybe that is good enough.
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Most of a robot is built with some fairly old-school stuff, like steel and copper, and this is unaffected by gamma rays (in the short term). The robot moves through the use of magnetics ie: Electric Motors. It turns out that most electric motors, along with the steel and rubber used in most robots is short-term invulnerable to low intensity (and even fairly high intensity) radiation. The issue is that certain types of radiation generate electric (and magnetic) fields which play havoc with some of the fancy sensors used in the newer brushless DC motor designs. The solution is to redesign the magnetics of the robot such that they use old-school technologies which operate happily in extreme environments.
Radiation sources like gamma rays will eventually effect some of the key non-electronic systems of robots. In particular, they can break down insulation. Also, they can render the entire robot radioactive, and not safe to be around people. Prolonged exposure to high-energy sources may also damage bearing surfaces, preventing robot motion. However, long before any of this happens, the electronics will act up.
The GP poster was trying to suggest: is (a) take a regular robot, (b) install radiation protected electronics, (c) use a bunch of old-school servo-motor technologies (like DC motors and resolvers), and (d) you will have a short-term survivable rad-hardened robot.
While it probably creates some noise, it shouldn't be that big of a problem for a camera. One video inside Chernobyl suggests this is not an issue. Another one from a robot inside.
Where were the robots? They were in the same place as the dosimeters, hazmat suits, geiger counters, breathing apparatus, standby generators, dual remote electrical hookups (Japan has two electrical standards), stocks of boron, reactor model upgrades, structure vents, and so on. In other words, nowhere. All preparation for emergencies was skipped. No doubt a couple decades of management bonuses were paid for keeping costs down.
This is why nuclear power is unsafe. Because you can't trust humans to run systems where a cost cut today doesn't blow up for 10-20 years. This kind of crap happens in all industries, it's just that in the nuclear industry the "oops" consequences are devastating.
Remain calm! All is well!