Fukushima Reactor Debris Stands No Chance Against Toshiba’s Slicing, Dicing Robot

It ’s already been almost five yr since the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant , and the review and clean - up is go to last decades . Our near weapon ? awful robots , like this one Toshibaannounced on Monday .

It calculate like a James Bond agony equipment , but this bad boy ’s here to clear up junk from the decommissioned plant that ’ll never reopen . This camera - covered , crane - like magpie practice two arms to snaffle and hack up fuel - rod assemblies — apparatus that antecedently supplied the reactor ’s fuel — from pools in nuclear reactor 3 of the plant . All those television camera give human operators an power to take care around in multiple directions within the nuclear reactor .

This particular task is particularly severe , because the radiation syndrome levels in the nuclear reactor are right smart too high for mankind . antecedently , in reactors with lower grade of radiotherapy , mankind were allow to be present and monitor the removal of the rod . But this job relies totally on RC robots . The unexampled Toshiba ‘ bot is scheduled to start removing 566 fuel - gat assemblies sometime next class .

The 2011 Tohoku seism , followup tsunami and resultant atomic catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeasterly Japan has had an impact on the country ’s technical school manufacture that ’ll shape invention for decades . Big tech company have started engineering productswith catastrophe reply in head . Last class , Toshiba used another robot built for inspecting Fukushima ’s reactors : a21 - inch RC scorpionbuilt to operate in a extremely radioactive setting .

In 2013 , Japan halt operations of all atomic reactors nationwide . Butlast August , reactors have start coming back online , much to public resistance . Japan ’s relationship with nuclear energyis complicated for certain , but hopefully robots can make it a more manageable one .

[ The Japan Times ]

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