It seems very likely that one of the reasons that no one knows what's going on inside the Fukushima nuclear reactors is that no one has the right technology to do so.
For example, if these were my personal nuclear plants, I would very much want to know why things were the way they were. So how would I do that?
On way would be to use something like this:
As you can see in the videos the copters are quite agile and would be able to maneuver around something like the wreckage or damaged buildings at Fukushima.
Now its quite possible that the radiation levels would pose a problem for these devices but my guess is that for a short term view of the situation they would work fine. The levels may be so high that you might not even want the devices to return.
The copters are sold in Germany here and, for the hire end models, cost around 1,000 euros.
Slap on a nice $100 USD WiFi camera (some examples here) and there you would have a way to see into the places in the plant where no man can go.
One also imagines that for the underground areas where there is little room to maneuver a flying machine a cheap RC car with the aforementioned WiFi camera would again do the trick.
Reading the various press reports about the Fukushima situation makes it clear that at a minimum seriously radioactive water is leaking out of the spent fuel pools and probably out of the reactors (probably though broken pipes, fitting, or a cracked containment). No doubt the radio activity is so high near these areas that it would be difficult for people to go in and examine these problems first hand.
To me this would be a solution.
Secondly, I think its a mistake for there to be so little information available outside Japan on this issue.
Having cameras and other technology probing the insides of the reactor complex is only going to help someone figure out solutions. Certainly there are likely things that TEPCO doesn't want to be seen but at this point I think any issue of embarrassment or legality is mute.
There are experts around the world with computers who could access these videos and make suggestions and/or recommendations.
Japan is also expert in various types of robotic technologies (I have also posted about other companies here with advanced robots). Once leaking pipes or fittings are found how is anyone going to be able to go into the plant and fix them? With plutonium and other poisonous radioactive compounds being emitted into the air and water no human would last long enough to do any good.
So robotic repair technologies will probably be the only answer. For example, there are many dexterous industrial robots in use for building cars. Take some of these and modify them: add a moving platform, cameras, welding tools, etc. so that they can repair things.
Just my $.02 USD...
No comments:
Post a Comment