Transforming Robot Gets Stuck In Fukushima Nuclear Reactor

An anonymous reader writes with more bad news for the people still dealing with the Fukushima nuclear accident. "The ability to change shape hasn't saved a robot probe from getting stuck inside a crippled Japanese nuclear reactor. Tokyo Electric Power will likely leave the probe inside the reactor housing at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex north of Tokyo after it stopped moving. On Friday, the utility sent a robot for the first time into the primary containment vessel (PCV) of reactor No. 1 at the plant, which was heavily damaged by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. 'The robot got stuck at a point two-thirds of its way inside the PCV and we are investigating the cause,' a Tokyo Electric spokesman said via email. The machine became stuck on Friday after traveling to 14 of 18 planned checkpoints."

Comments

Beginning of a movie

[MightyYar]

This sounds like the beginning of a movie about sentient robots.

Re:Beginning of a movie

[itzly]

Don't worry. You need radiation for the robots to become sentient.

Re:Beginning of a movie

[Tablizer]

"We'll send some trained lizards into the radiated environment to free the robot. It's a fool-proof plan."

Re:Beginning of a movie

[bobbied]

Don't worry. You need radiation for the robots to become sentient.

Or a lighting strike... Well that and an animal rights nut job named Stephaney to befriend you.

Please, Don't tell Michael Bay

[jd2112]

Lets not give him any ideas for another horrible Transformers movie...

Re:Please, Don't tell Michael Bay

[gstoddart]

Love it, hate it .. but, honestly you simply can't discount a film franchise in which two of the four movies have had global revenues of over a billion dollars and shows up on the lists of highest grossing films.

At the end of the day, screw artistic merit when you earn zillions of dollars.

You don't have to like it, but there's not escaping that they've been successful. As long as those movies make that much money, you can count on more of them.

Re:Please, Don't tell Michael Bay

[Hussman32]

Look at it this way, Universal Studios makes the Transformers series. Any serious filmgoer won't even watch them on the plane, but the studio rakes in enough cash to make movies like No Country for Old Men, Watchmen, Up In the Air, Interstellar, and a bunch of other movies you may or may not want to see.

As long as they keep making enough good movies to justify the crap, I don't mind.

Re:Please, Don't tell Michael Bay

[tlhIngan]

Love it, hate it .. but, honestly you simply can't discount a film franchise in which two of the four movies have had global revenues of over a billion dollars and shows up on the lists of highest grossing films.

At the end of the day, screw artistic merit when you earn zillions of dollars.

You don't have to like it, but there's not escaping that they've been successful. As long as those movies make that much money, you can count on more of them.

The technical term is "Asses in seats". Hollywood knows summer blockbusters are basically plotless action flicks that really have little artistic merit, but damn do they get those asses into those seats.

And it's just fine. Every other creative medium has similar things going for it - books can be pulp or they can be literature, or span the wide gap between them. Movies can be thought-provoking, life altering with tons of subtext, or they can consist of people just blowing crap up. You see this in video games too - from your standard FPS shooter that sells and makes billions to your indie game exposing some human condition.

Just because Depression Quest is a thought-provoking video game doesn't mean you can't have your Call of Duty.

Ironically, though, Michael Bay isn't a bad a filmmaker as you think. He actually does do quite a few things right that other filmmakers do wrong.

Not a problem

[Kardos]

.... just send in another transforming robot to retrieve it.

Rope

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have tied a rope on it to pull it out.

I've seen this movie...

[grasshoppa]

..next we hear from Japan, some crazy, 50 ft tall robot will be destroying Tokyo.

Respawn

[Anonymous Coward]

They shouldjust force suicide and respwan at the last checkpoint

obligatory lyrical rendition

[nimbius]

Something feebles watching over you
Comin' from the pipe!
And there's no way it can move

Prepare to gripe!
There'll be no place to run
When your caught in checkpoint 14
Of the evil PCV


Transformers! (moves a bit, then dies)
Transformers! (leave the probe inside)

Re:Confidence, that's the ticket

[itzly]

Self driving cars only need to make less errors than smartphone-distracted humans. That's not a very high standard.

Re:Confidence, that's the ticket

[HornWumpus]

There are two streams of data. Marketing coming from Google and real data coming from various DARPA challenge participants.

Guess which one you are listening to?

No self driving car has yet driven in 'the wild' without a professional driver ready to take control at a moments notice. Control transfers that are routine, even on divided highways.

The Japanese Perocialism

[Required Snark]

The Japanese have been very reluctant to use non-Japanese technology for Fukushima problems. They would rather use home grown systems, and this has not worked out very well for them.

For example, their record on handling radioactive water has been a list of miserable failures. Briefly, there were three different systems used to treat the water being used to cool the reactors: a French system from AREVA, a system from Kurion, a startup based in Orange County California, and a system built by Hiatachi/Tobshba. The timeline is complex, but both the French and Japanese systems broke almost immediately when they went into full scale operation. The Kurion system was more reliable, but it was not used as the primary cleanup platform.

The muon imaging that has been used to verify core meltdowns was developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and LLNL proposed that they work directly with TEPCO. Instead TEPCO worked with the US company that ended up with the equipment after the LLNL development project ended. All the press releases describe the imaging as being done by Hiatachi, who ran the detector in Japan. Even so, there are actually two different muon imaging systems in place, and one of them is directly from LLNL. The results from the second LLNL detector have not been officially announced yet.

Outside Japan, experts were not optimistic about the ice wall project to keep ground water from entering the reactor buildings. They spent a lot of time, effort and money and then had to give up.

I can only speculate, but I think they are very reluctant to use US technology unless they can rebrand it as Japanese. I think they want to show that they are better at high tech the the US.

They may match or beat the US in industrial applications, but because of DARPA investment in disaster and military technology, the US has more robust robot technology for chaotic real world conditions. Just look at ASIMO vs Boston Dynamics PETMAN, ATLAS or BIG DOG. The Boston Dynamics robots all have videos where they are being shoved and kicked and stay upright. It's obvious that one good shove and ASIMO would end up on the floor and might be badly damaged.

It just seems strange that there has not been more collaboration between Japan and the rest of the world for dealing with the Fukushima disaster. DARPA has been working on robots for HASMAT environment for a long time and yet they have no presence at Fukushima. It seems that Japanese ethnocentrism and pride is now making a bad situation more difficult.