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Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

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Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#141

Post by vidarh »

prebrov wrote: post #125
jenga22 wrote: post #105

I wonder what they do once the robot sees the uranium? I mean the robot itself is now heavily contaminated. Do they just leave the robot down there? Or do they somehow decontaminate it so they can use it again?

Robots just kept dying in there all those years [1]. I reckon they are disposable, in effect. [1]: http://mashable.com/2017/03/03/fukushima-robots-fail/

That's the primary reason it's taken so long, as far as I understand. It's not that it was hard to find the location, per se, but that the robots didn't last long enough.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#142

Post by distances »

nv-vn wrote: post #126
toomuchtodo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nuclear is very slow to build in the Western world. Finland is already in their 12th year building Olkiluoto 3

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#143

Post by ifdefdebug »

kurthr wrote: post #26
hexane360 wrote: post #15

"At Chernobyl, the Soviets simply entombed the charred reactor in concrete after the deadly 1986 accident. But Japan has pledged to dismantle the Fukushima plant and decontaminate the surrounding countryside, which was home to about 160,000 people who were evacuated after accident." How much of this decision is simply about space? Russia is the largest country by area, with 21 people per square mile, while Japan is m…

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…

> 230k people still displaced in 2015

The displacement is mostly due to radioactive contamination still being high in several zones around Fukushima.

The tsunami was a huge catastrophe but it's over. There is no breaking news to get coverage.

Fukushima on the other hand is an ongoing disaster producing news from time to time which, naturally, get coverage.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#144

Post by StreamBright »

dopamean wrote: post #27
babuskov wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm possibly nitpicking here, but Chernobyl is not in Russia.

Not but it was in the USSR at the time which many people incorrectly equate with Russia today. To me it's almost ok to say "Russia" when talking about things back then. So long as you don't say Chernobyl is in Russia today.

For you it might be ok but for us who lived in the USSR it is an insult. Just a heads up, you can get into a bar fight anywhere in Eastern Europe referring to these countries as Russia.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#145

Post by StreamBright »

jpatokal wrote: post #47
hexane360 wrote: post #15

"At Chernobyl, the Soviets simply entombed the charred reactor in concrete after the deadly 1986 accident. But Japan has pledged to dismantle the Fukushima plant and decontaminate the surrounding countryside, which was home to about 160,000 people who were evacuated after accident." How much of this decision is simply about space? Russia is the largest country by area, with 21 people per square mile, while Japan is m…

160k is around 0.15% of Japan's population, and there's plenty of space for them to move to since the countryside is rapidly depopulating. Of course, it's not quite that easy to forcibly migrate people in practice...

You gonna move their jobs as well? There is a reason why they were living at the area at the first place.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#146

Post by StreamBright »

frik wrote: post #133
wiz21c wrote: post #38

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...

> reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes 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)

Actually you cannot. They do not let anybody live near to these sites.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#147

Post by kurthr »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #143
kurthr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 230k people still displaced in 2015 The displacement is mostly due to radioactive contamination still being high in several zones around Fukushima. The tsunami was a huge catastrophe but it's over. There is no breaking news to get coverage. Fukushima on the other hand is an ongoing disaster producing news from time to time which, naturally, get coverage.

No, they are separate. Only 100k people are still displaced by Fukushima covering an area of over 400km2.

http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the-nuclea...

Sendai is some 50km away from Fukushima and the population center is well outside the evacuation area. Tamura and Minamisoma are the only cities within it.

The tsunami destroyed 400k structures and decimated Sendai, which (note that the figures in the linked article are in 10s of people and structures as indicated at the top of the figures). Some 300k people and 100k homes were within the inundation, ~25% of the local population.

http://tohokugeo.jp/articles/e-contents16.html

In the Fukushima evacuation area the majority of the surface is less than 4x background radition ~1uSv/hr. In discussing an ongoing disaster please look at this video:

https://youtu.be/G_0rQ9hnP84?t=477

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Contamination_dropping_...

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#148

Post by jimcsharp »

petepete wrote: post #139
geon wrote: post #138

> 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.

YouTube really should be detecting and pushing them to the bottom of search results. Downvoting doesn't appear to have much of an effect.

I believe likes and dislikes on Youtube both count as "interaction" as far as rankings are concerned.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#149

Post by adrianN »

justinjlynn wrote: post #137
themodelplumber wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unfortunately, I'd imagine the vast majority of the helpful information learned will be kept a proprietary secret.

I could imagine that shielding electronics from radiation could fall under military secret.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#150

Post by SiempreViernes »

archgoon wrote: post #79
SiempreViernes wrote: post #66

> "... exotic space particles called muons " welph, that's my eyes rolling right out of my head. I mean really, "space particles"! The might as well call all metals "supernova remnants" -_-

Would you prefer for them to be referred to them as "Cosmic Rays" :) ? To be honest, "Space Particles" sounds less silly and more descriptive. It also emphasizes that they're not generating the muons themselves, but collecting them from space. EDIT: Though I guess, now that I think of it, it's a bit unfair to refer to muons as 'exotic'. People will typically encounter thousands of them in a day [1]. [1] http://cosmic…

Yeah, of course! They are cosmic ray muons after all, as in "muons created by cosmic rays". The words "space particles" is more correctly applied to dust (the type in space obvs.) and stuff like that in my opinion.

Honestly "space particle" to me sounds to be the same sort of suspect phrase as "space pen".

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