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If Robots Can’t Survive Radiation Exposure, What Will?

Catwell

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Tattered flag in Fukushima, Japan. The tsunami that hit japan in 2011 caused serious damage to the country, including the destruction of a nuclear power plant. Radiation leakage continues to be a problem that even robots cannot combat. How, then, can we respond to nuclear emergencies safely?

 

In 2011, one of the worst tsunamis on record hit Japan. Nearly 16,000 people were confirmed dead. Of the survivors, 230,000 were displaced, and many still live in temporary housing. Perhaps the most unfortunate result of the attack was the destruction of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant. The plant, which is run by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), leaked an estimated few hundred tons of nuclear fuel rods.

 

The destruction of the plant has serious ecological consequences. It is believed that at least a small portion of the radioactive waste has come into contact with the ocean by way of contaminated groundwater that connects the plant to the coast coastal region. And while TEPCO built a ‘wall of ice’ along the edge of the seabed to prevent further leakage, the cleanup is projected to take 30 to 40 years.

 

The level of radiation exposure at the site is too high for humans to withstand. In fact, an estimated 8,000 workers bustle around the facility removing debris and pouring water into radiated reactors just to keep the temperature down. The damage done to the reactors allowed the nuclear fuel rods to burn through the specialized containment vessels, meaning that not only has tons of nuclear waste been released, but also, no one is quite sure of the rods’ location.

 

To solve the issue, TEPCO spent two years developing a robot to locate the missing rods. The bot was equipped with a live camera feed, and was programmed to swim underwater to offset any radiation damage. The heat from the reactors was so strong, however, it melted the machine’s wires before any valuable footage was recorded. TEPCO was disappointed and revealed it will take another two years to develop a new robot.

 

While the power company devises a new plan, the challenge poses a real concern to global safety. If such an event was to happen again, how could emergency responders combat radiation that is even too strong for robots? The Nuclear Energy Institute and U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have stated the United States strives to use infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters, so a similar event does not occur in the U.S. One such idea includes back-up containment vessels to withstand the heat emitted by nuclear reactors. Still, this does not solve the issue of what to do in Japan now.

 

The truth is, no one knows what to do. Japan has been heavily criticized for neglecting to safeguard against natural disasters and emergencies. And while it’s helpful for preventative planning, this kind of thinking serves only to point the blame, and offers no solution to decrease the significant ecological damage that resulted from the incident. If robots are the answer, the technology has to be developed much further to withstand heat and radiation of nuclear waste. Until that time comes, we can only wait. (I say that often, we wait too much.)

 

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  • I think there is some misunderstanding going on here..... If a containment vessel was intact, there might be water at a high pressure and at higher-than-boiling temperatures. But the source of the problems is that the containment vessels are NOT intact...  So things must be happening at atmospheric pressure, i.e. at most at around water-boiling-temperatures. The article says the HEAT melted the wires. The title is click-bait, the robot breaking down does not have anything to do with the radiation (except that the nuclear fuel that happens to be radioactive heats the water). 

     

    So suggesting how to make robots radiation hard has nothing to do with the problem at hand...

  • in reply to rscasny

    You misunderstand.

     

    I said that nuclear FUSION was endo-energetic.

     

    That means that there are NO breakeven points from which to build a fusion power plant.

     

    I disagree about your statement on nuclear fission.  It can be both efficient and practical if we would just build a better power extraction plant.  The current systems were made to just plug into a standard steam driven system, but run at such low efficiency that they are expensive to build and operate.

     

    DAB

  • in reply to DAB

    Unless the definition of endothermic and exothermic have changed recently, nuclear fission is not an endothermic reaction as you suggest (I guess), but an exothermic reaction. Why in the world could it be used as in a power plant if it was endothermic, that is, needing an energy input to sustain the reaction. Check the definition or clarify how you are using the term or provide the calculations.

     

    Now, energy efficiency is another discussion. Yes, I'd agree that fission is not efficient nor practical -- how does one store the waste of spent fuel cells or even transport it to a storage facility without upsetting the public?

  • in reply to rscasny

    Contrary to accepted belief, nuclear fission is the ONLY way to extract energy from atoms.

     

    Nuclear fusion, despite all of its hype, is an endo-energy process.  That means that you will never reach an energy breakeven point conducting nuclear fusion.  After all, sixty years of the same experimental results cannot be ignored.

     

    Therefore, we are ignoring a tremendous resource by inefficiently exploiting nuclear fission.

     

    We are currently only extracting about 5% of the potential energy from a radioactive atom.  That is an unacceptable rate of return on investment.

     

    DAB

  • in reply to DAB

    "Radiation is our friend, not [sic] our enemy," is a notion that had never occurred to me.

     

    I'm not totally against nuclear power. I was in the US Navy and graduated Naval Nuclear Power school. In general, the navy has operated its nuclear power-ed fleet responsibly to my knowledge in recent years. I do remember Three Mile Island. And I do recall the Scorpion and the Thresher sinking a long time ago. But Rickover wasn't stupid like the folks at TEPCO who "sunk" Fukushima. Poor design in anything can be vetted out by good and necessary oversight. Unfortunately, the nuclear industry in general is not run by the most upstanding businessmen.But back to the point of the article. While high ambient temp robots can be built Don Hersey's Blog, their existence is a side show to the real issue: common sense commissioning of nuke plants and good plant design as you so aptly pointed out.