5 ms·
I still don't see why they are spending years trying to make rad hard robots. A long steel tube with fiber optics to pipe in light, mirrors and optics to trans
by marze 9y ago
I still don't see why they are spending years trying to make rad hard robots.
A long steel tube with fiber optics to pipe in light, mirrors and optics to transmit an image down the tube would be infinitely easier. They'd need to burn a few holes, but none of the reactor vessels are intact so that wouldn't allow additional radioactive material to escape.
I'm surprised the Japanese decision to dump the all the tritium contaminated water into the ocean hasn't made more news.
- jdubs 9y agoComplex problems often require complex solutions. I imagine that your suggestion works for some situations but not all. The cynical side of me thinks that one of the few benefits of the disaster will be new technology and robots that will help prevent future disasters. I imagine there's a very high priced market for these kinds of hardened robots.
- agumonkey 9y agoThere was a documentary about Tchernobyl surrounding forest few years ago. Most of the vegetation grew back, healthily for my naked eye. Anyways, the most surprising part is that mammals were back too; even though the radiation level was higher than average. I concluded that only a few generation of darwinian selection is needed to breed radiation hardened humans.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoAnimals that die within 5 years probably don't have enough time to succumb to the effects of radiation. That's just a guess though.
- agumonkey 9y agoPossibly, and maybe with lower radiation levels they don't exhibit mutations...
- dasil003 9y agoIt's also quite random, they may live there and the background radiation isn't bad enough on average to kill them, but then if they accidentally ingest a few hot particles it could be game over pretty quickly. For most animals this might not even register in the top 10 existential threats, but for humans the psychological stress would be debilitating.
- maxerickson 9y agoWhy would you draw such a concrete conclusion? What about the animals you possibly didn't see and how many animals reach fertility in 2-3 years?
- agumonkey 9y agoBecause I watch too many X-Men movies
- frivoal 9y agoAlternatively, the animals aren't radiation hardened and do die of cancer, but not fast enough to get in the way of breeding and multiplying. Or, in other words, while radioactive waste is unhealthy, it fatality rate is lower than having humans around.
- nolok 9y agoOr put another way : evolution and natural selection aren't about living a long time, they're about reproducing.
- Pica_soO 9y agoOr put another way: Nothing is that poisonous that nature cant swallow it first and bring it underground, thus making nature the ultimate hipster.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago... which is why nuclear holocaust is a risk for individuals and nations but not an extinction risk for the species as a whole.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mikeash 9y agoKeep in mind that the Chernobyl exclusion zone has not been fully enforced, and people do live there: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-26/30-years-after-chernobyl-these-ukrainian-babushkas-are-still-living-their-toxic https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-26/30-years-after-cherno... It's probably unwise, but it's not super deadly.
- marze 9y agoIf a solution does the job, it does the job. In the six years since the meltdowns, they've been building these robots, which up until this year, have all failed. With an electronics-free periscope, they could have saved five years. And keep in mind, the radioisotopes are still flowing into the ocean this whole time.
- aluhut 9y agoI'm pretty sure the accident in Fukushima accelerated the development in this niche. Especially in Japan.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Pica_soO 9y agoRadiation safe robots could be a plus in space one day.
- xor1 9y ago>I'm surprised the Japanese decision to dump the all the tritium contaminated water into the ocean hasn't made more news. Why does that surprise you?
- QAPereo 9y ago>A long steel tube with fiber optics to pipe in light, mirrors and optics to transmit an image down the tube would be infinitely easier. That seems likely to degrade the fiber, or the signal and I'm having trouble thinking of any tested fiber in the range of a molten reactor core. The flux is really crazy near that thing, and not just photons, but relativistic electrons and some very angry helium nuclei.
- marze 9y agoCladding would degrade. But a large diameter glass rod would be fine. There are a lot of options, including a scanning the light source combined with a non imaging sensor. Or you could put a scintillating detector in a lead ball with a hole, and scan by rotation and pipe the light from the scintillator out to external electronics. All you need is a long pipe installed to get started.
- eternauta3k 9y ago> That seems likely to degrade the fiber, or the signal Could you go into more detail?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chiph 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_on_optical_fibers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_on_optical_f...
- planteen 9y agoGlass darkens from radiation exposure. Even UV does it, Coke bottles at old high altitude mines in Colorado turn a purple color.
- AlexCoventry 9y agoPictures aren't the ultimate goal. This is a first step towards cleanup, and that'll need more than optics.
- maxerickson 9y agoThey want to retrieve samples and eventually remove the melted fuel. The robots will likely at least be useful for retrieving the samples.
- frik 9y agoWell written, fully agree with your points. An bigger size endoscope with fiber cable would be best solution - low tech is better in such use case. And dumping contaminated water is really bad, unfortunately news gets censored everywhere in 2017.
- alex_young 9y ago> I'm surprised the Japanese decision to dump the all the tritium contaminated water into the ocean hasn't made more news. Why? It seems relatively safe, and there doesn't seem to be much else to do with it. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/13/is-it-safe-to-dump-fukushima-waste-into-the-sea https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...
- ac29 9y agoQuick summary: They are putting a little over 50mL of a weakly radioactive, fast decaying isotope into the ocean. It will be undetectable within a few years. Natural tritium production (from cosmic rays) occurs at at a rate 3 orders of magnitude higher [0] than is occurring at Fukushima [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Cosmic_rays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Cosmic_rays [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Fukushima_Daiichi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Fukushima_Daiichi
- raverbashing 9y ago> I'm surprised the Japanese decision to dump the all the tritium contaminated water into the ocean hasn't made more news. Oh you mean the dump that had 4 grams of tritium in it? Not drinking water for sure, but less worrying than it seems at first https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/6nenrd/fukushima_plant_owner_decides_to_dump_777000_tons/dk8y6sd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/6nenrd/fukushima...
- nate_meurer 9y agoHonest question: do you really think they haven't thought of this? You think that none of these engineers and scientists have yet thought of your shielded fiber optics idea? I'm not trying to be mean, I'm really curious. Radiation shielding is a hard problem. For meaningful reduction of xray and gamma radiation in this environment, we're talking inches of lead cladding [0]. And even that won't ensure a useful lifespan for your fiber, exposed to at least tens of Sv/h along much of its length. And cladding doesn't even begin to address the problem posed by neutron radiation. The environment in Reactor 2 isn't just hostile to life; it's hostile to organized matter. http://www.eichrom.com/PDF/gamma-ray-attenuation-white-paper-by-d.m.-rev-4.pdf http://www.eichrom.com/PDF/gamma-ray-attenuation-white-paper...
- marze 9y agoYou don't need cladding on a simple light pipe. Did they consider non-electronics solutions? Who knows. It may be the sooner they discover where the fuel went, the sooner they need to start spending the $80B to dig it out. So slow is a feature.
- nate_meurer 9y agoWhere'd you get that idea? :) You absolutely would need cladding on a light pipe, and lots of it. All kinds of optical materials are subject to darkening, clouding, and embrittlement by much lower levels of ionizing radiation than exist in the reactor [0]. Again, here we're talking about tremendous amounts of radiation over much of the pipe's length, so even small amounts of damage per unit length are going to quickly render the pipe useless for imaging. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a013786.pdf http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a013786.pdf
- marze 9y agoI see the problem, you are misunderstanding the proposal. I suggested using optics for imaging, and fiber to bring in illumination. You'd have a telescope-like camera at the far end. No image transmission through a fiber bundle. You would need refractive elements that would work in the high radiation environment. As for the illumination, collimated light down a polish steel tube would obviously work, but a rod of glass should work as well.
- nether 9y agoYou know, NASA didn't actually spend all that money developing the space pen.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]