Robot Squeezes Suspected Nuclear Fuel Debris in Fukushima Reactor (theverge.com)

A robot outfitted with remotely controlled pinchers poked at debris that's suspected to contain molten nuclear fuel at the bottom of one of Fukushima's nuclear reactors, World Nuclear News reports. From a report: The poking and prodding is part of the ongoing cleanup effort at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the site of a major nuclear accident in 2011. The dextrous robot was dangled into the Unit 2 reactor on February 13th, according to a news release from the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). Unit 2 is one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant that overheated after a massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, which caused the reactor core to melt. TEPCO suspects that radioactive fuel may have melted through the bottom of the reactor vessel to fall into the containment structure surrounding it. The company has to find the radioactive debris and figure out how to remove them, so TEPCO has been sending in a series of robots to scout out the reactors. It's a dangerous journey that some of the robots haven't survived.

Comments

This is the origin of

[Tablizer]

Poke-e-mon.

Re:So this -still- hasn't been contained?

[AmiMoJo]

That's pretty much the problem, they can barely get to it, let alone remove it for burial. They are trying to avoid it becoming another huge Chernobyl-style concrete coffin because it would need to be protected from tsunami and constantly maintained (they have regular earthquakes) indefinitely.

Also "overheated" is a rather obvious attempt to avoid the word "meltdown".

Please don't squeeze the Charmin

[jfdavis668]

Mr. Whipple will get upset.

No wonder it's taking so long

[blindseer]

The dextrous robot was dangled into the Unit 2 reactor

Maybe if they didn't make their robots out of sugar they would last longer under the heat.

Re:whare are all the nuclear apologists?

[Solandri]

• Chernoby cleanup cost: $235 billion.
• Fukushima cleanup cost: $197 billion
• Total amount of nuclear power generated since commercial nuclear power became widely available: about 86000 TWh
  about 20 years ramping up from 0 to 2000 TWh/yr, plus 30 years at about 2200 TWh/yr = (20*2000/2) + (30*2200) = 86000

Cost of the above two cleanups divided by the amount of energy generated by nuclear power: $432 billion / 86000 billion kWh = $0.005 per kWh = 0.5 cents per kWh

I can live with paying an extra half cent per kWh to cover cleaning up after the occasional disaster every 25 years, in exchange for using a completely carbon-neutral power source which boasts the fewest deaths per amount of power generated. Why exactly are you opposed to it?