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Excessive Radiation Inside Fukushima Fries Clean-Up Robot (gizmodo.com)
"A remotely-controlled robot sent to inspect and clean a damaged reactor at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant had to be pulled early when its onboard camera went dark, the result of excess radiation," reports Gizmodo. "The abbreviated mission suggests that radiation levels inside the reactor are even higher than was reported last week -- and that robots are going to have a hell of a time cleaning this mess up." From the report: Last week, Gizmodo reported that radiation levels inside the containment vessel of reactor No. 2 at Fukushima reached a jaw-dropping 530 sieverts per hour, a level high enough to kill a human within seconds. Some Japanese government officials questioned the reading because Tokyo Electric Power Company Holding (TEPCO) calculated it by looking at camera interference on the robot sent in to investigate, rather than measuring it directly with a geiger counter or dosimeter. It now appears that this initial estimate may have been too low. Either that, or TEPCO's robot is getting closer to the melted fuel -- which is very likely. High radiation readings near any of the used fuel are to be expected. Yesterday, that same remotely operated robot had to be pulled when its camera began to fail after just two hours of exposure to the radiation inside the damaged reactor. Accordingly, TEPCO has revised its estimate to about 650 sieverts per hour, which is 120 more sieverts than what was calculated late last month (although the new estimate comes with a 30 percent margin of error). The robot is designed to withstand about 1,000 accumulated sieverts, which given the failure after two hours, jibes well with the camera interference. This likely means that the melted fuel burned through its pressure vessel during the meltdown in March of 2011, and is sitting somewhere nearby.
It's clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There are radiation resistant electronics but it isn't something you'll find off a shelf. Plus if its a hot neutron source pretty much no electronics they I know of are going to work properly.
Still one would expect they had a more accurate and cost effective way to measure the level of radiation before sending an expensive robot in.
Why, I read on Slashdot just the other day that a few remote controlled bulldozers could have Fukushima cleaned up in a month and that tree-hugging anti-growth enviros should shut their pieholes about that accident.
sPh
Please don't talk about nuclear power until you understand the basic principals, like what a meltdown actually is. Unless, of course, you actually want to sound like an idiot. Which I kind of suspect is the case.
Or rather, excessively more expensive once reality demonstrates the inadequacy of ElCheapo risk management and risk avoidance. Interestingly, cost comparisons never include these factors. If humanity were not so stupid as a group, the refusal of all insurers to ever cover nuclear reactors should have been a really large hint. And we have not even started to tackle the problem of dismantling non-melted down reactors and storing spend fuel. Fun for the next few 1'000 or so generations to come!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You would think very wrong. This was, incidentally, already discovered at Chernobyl at much, much lower radiation levels. All the robots sent from the west failed pretty soon. The whole nuclear power industry is built on the assumption that such accidents do not happen and hence it is not at all prepared for them. That makes it exceptionally unprofessional from an engineering point of view.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
How will space colonization ever takeoff if the Earth is not made uninhabitable?
**Life is too short to be serious**
You laugh, but tubes aren't affected by ionizing radiation.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Humanity has basically no experience with radiation levels this high.
There are higher radiation levels inside an operating reactor. And humanity deals with spent fuel pools with similar level of radioactivity all the time. The difference is that those situations have the spent fuel sealed inside fuel rods and safely shielded by lots of water rather than spread out across the floor, in the air, etc.
In other words, the morons screaming hysterically about nuclear energy are in large part being enabled and encouraged by the morons responsible for designing and implementing it.
Rather like web security, then.
Then that's just about everything.
Yes, you got it in one.
Wind disaster: wind turbine catches on fire. Maybe falls over and kills a cow. We don't have to have humans climb them any more until they actually need work, because we are now inspecting them with drones.
Solar disaster: solar installer falls off roof, probably dies. This is very sad and we should integrate the solar into a metal roof which lasts longer and has better failure modes and is fireproof rather than retrofitting onto old houses with crappy roofs and no preinstalled roof anchors.
Oil disaster: ugh. oil is a disaster. too valuable to burn, let alone spill all over ducks.
Coal disaster: mining it is a disaster. burning it is a disaster.
Nuclear disaster: potentially renders large area uninhabitable by humans for long periods, even if it doesn't kill anyone directly it substantially increases cancer risk for large numbers of people.
I mean, holy shit. Can we please, please, pretty please account for the worst case?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Where "everything" is a light water reactor such as the BWRs and PWRs of this period, it certainly looks like that's the case. That isn't universally true though; the graphite-moderated Magnox and AGR designs of the same era can passively cool entirely by CO convection. The downside is they have a lower power density, but the only failure I've read about was a partial melt of a single Magnox fuel rod after a blockage in a single channel interrupted the airflow.
They've done that. However, the resolution is terrible and the fibers get fucked up when they get dragged over a neutron source (they've used plastic fibers since they survive repeated bending much better than glass fibers.