131–140 of 190 posts
Kind of surprising at this point that there’s not an area directly below the bottom of the reactor with a giant ceramic catch basin (or something similarly heat resistant) to catch these failures and cleared of pipes etc so when this happens cleanup workers know the location of the materials.
That's part of some newer reactor designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher
Does anyone know how they extract the molten fuel? Sounds like they will use more robots, but if it's taken this long just to get a robot to see the target, how on earth does a robot retrieve this stuff? Must be a career defining experience for these robotists, doing something that can really help an awful situation
That's basically what they say at the end of the article: “I’ve been a robotic engineer for 30 years, and we’ve never faced anything as hard as this,” said Shinji Kawatsuma, director of research and development at the center. “This is a divine mission for Japan’s robot engineers.”
That is so cool. I'd love to see some kind of "lessons learned" summary from the robotics people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...
Stupid comment. Would you relocated near Fukushima or Chernobyl? Maybe you should. You would educate yourself and change your mind. And you would have to life with the related health issues. (The same for evil greedy owners of such energy companies)
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Nuclear will never be able to compete with renewables on cost or deployment speed. It’s dead tech for anything other than space probes and military uses.
How? Nuclear tech is already much more developed than other renewables and it's incredibly efficient. The cost of solar is much higher than the cost of nuclear. Hydroelectric and wind are both lower, but they also require certain geography and can't be used anywhere. Nuclear is not dead tech at all, most of France's power comes from nuclear.
(Also, nuclear is not a renewable by an sensible measure)
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Chernobyl is still in Ukrane (near the boarder with Belarus) and not Russia (yet). At the time it was part of the Soviet Union, but Ukraine has always been a bread basket of Central Europe. Fundamentally, Chernobyl is a much larger (order of magnitude) event with 6 tons of radioactive material burned and released. Frankly, for all the coverage Fukushima gets, it's amazing that you rarely hear about the associated tsu…
"yet" +++
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's basically what they say at the end of the article: “I’ve been a robotic engineer for 30 years, and we’ve never faced anything as hard as this,” said Shinji Kawatsuma, director of research and development at the center. “This is a divine mission for Japan’s robot engineers.”
> This is a divine mission for Japan’s robot engineers That is so cool. I'd love to see some kind of "lessons learned" summary from the robotics people.
This has to be the worst possible way of sharing information; a video of 2 still images and a computer voice reading a text.
Right up there with images inside a word document, inside an email.
> https://youtu.be/c5hQ6WlioRE This has to be the worst possible way of sharing information; a video of 2 still images and a computer voice reading a text. Right up there with images inside a word document, inside an email.
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> Kind of surprising at this point Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old. You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.
Also, from what I understand, they ignored the reports that recommended to put the backup generators on higher ground and to make the sea wall higher. Fukashima is the worst case for that design I think.
A great article about another plant, closer to the epicenter, owned by another company that did things right.
It breaks my heart that these guys also have to be in a shutdown state. TEPCO should be forced to hand over all undamaged nuclear plants and responsibility (minus financial) to this company.