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Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
- ukulele 9y ago> At the plant’s entrance, a sign warned: “Games like Pokemon GO are forbidden within the facility.” Was this a thing people were doing? Going to a nuclear disaster site as part of a game?
- MaulingMonkey 9y agoCould also be workers at the site on their lunch breaks.
- NikolaeVarius 9y agoProbably nowhere near as dangerous but I think its interesting. https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-shadow-of-chernobyl-stalker https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-shadow-of-cherno...
- trhway 9y agoA number of Russian middle class volunteers who fought in Donbass war treated it as kind of similar experience - an adventurous game/vacation, a "noble quest to defend 'Russian world' from dark forces of fascism and imperialism".
- Barrin92 9y agomaybe they thought they could find a genuine pokemon?
- thesmallestcat 9y agoIt's exactly the sort of place where you'd find the baddest pokemon in the game.
- faceplanted 9y agoDefinitely the kind of place you should find Ditto.
- Zaita 9y agoSigns forbidden the use of games like Pokemon Go are quite common across Japans. You find them at many Temples etc. Many cafes/bars/eateries have signs out the front with drawings of the Pokemon you'd find nearby with Pokemon Go. Source. Went through Japan playing Pokemon Go.. saw many many Japanese people playing Pokemon Go. And signs.. signs with Pokemon everywhere.
- millisecond 9y agoWeb link not bypassing paywall for me, anyone else? Or am I in some experimental cohort? :)
- jwilk 9y agoIt worked for me. Anyway, here's an archived copy: https://archive.is/jQlRG https://archive.is/jQlRG
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rtkwe 9y agoKind of surprising at this point that there’s not an area directly below the bottom of the reactor with a giant ceramic catch basin (or something similarly heat resistant) to catch these failures and cleared of pipes etc so when this happens cleanup workers know the location of the materials.
- eberkund 9y agoI think that is easier said than done, the temperatures are in the several thousands of degrees here.
- IshKebab 9y agoClay would hold that wouldn't it?
- Neil44 9y agoDepends, most types of ceramic are molten by 1300-1400 centigrade
- faceplanted 9y agoThese catchers exist, they use a ceramic-concrete mixture with a massive melting temperature.
- askvictor 9y agoAnd radioactive. Which changes the atoms if which your containment material is made of. Which makes things much, much more difficult.
- philipkglass 9y agoThat's part of some newer reactor designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher
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- hexane360 9y ago"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 much smaller, with 873 people per square mile. If you compare GDP/area the difference is even greater.
- babuskov 9y agoI'm possibly nitpicking here, but Chernobyl is not in Russia.
- dopamean 9y agoNot 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.
- jonstewart 9y agoYou're probably not Ukrainian, then. Or Belarussian or Georgian or Lithuanian or Latvian or...
- freehunter 9y agoIt's almost like people from different countries have different names for other nations. Language is weird like that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- izacus 9y agoUkraine and Russia were practically in a shooting war a few years ago. It's about as "ok" as walking around your Californian office calling people "Confederates"... if the civil war happened in 2014. Don't insult people with ignorance.
- JonoW 9y agoDoes anyone know how they extract the molten fuel? Sounds like they will use more robots, but if it's taken this long just to get a robot to see the target, how on earth does a robot retrieve this stuff? Must be a career defining experience for these robotists, doing something that can really help an awful situation
- nielsbot 9y agoThat's basically what they say at the end of the article: “I’ve been a robotic engineer for 30 years, and we’ve never faced anything as hard as this,” said Shinji Kawatsuma, director of research and development at the center. “This is a divine mission for Japan’s robot engineers.”
- themodelplumber 9y ago> 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.
- justinjlynn 9y agoUnfortunately, I'd imagine the vast majority of the helpful information learned will be kept a proprietary secret.
- adrianN 9y agoI could imagine that shielding electronics from radiation could fall under military secret.
- justinjlynn 9y agoThese days, once you get to the level where you can afford to develop them in the first place, there really isn't that much of a difference.
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- civilian 9y agoWhat is the article talking about when they say "radiation-hardened materials"? What kind of materials might that be?
- jjoonathan 9y ago"Neutron embrittlement" is a term to chase down. Generally people talk about the effects on metal, but I'm sure neutrons affect ceramics, too.
- ghaff 9y agoOne of the issues with metal is that it starts out as a ductile material and neutrons can embrittle it by introducing voids and dislocations. (i.e. basically moving the atoms around from their ordered crystal state) I'm sure some of the same mechanisms apply to ceramics but they're fairly brittle to start with so designs/applications using ceramics need to account for the fact that they're brittle from Day One.
- perlgeek 9y agoI don't know what they did in this particular instance, but basically there are two things you can do: shield, or in the case of electronics, use larger parts. The smaller some piece of electronics is, the smaller the charges in there are, and the easier it is to introduce errors with ionizing radiation.
- _ph_ 9y agoAnd the design of the electronics might help with radiation tolerance. Computation paths could be redundant to detect/eliminate bit flips due to radiaton. (Some server Power cpus seem to run parallel in pairs, comparing the output at critical parts to detect cpu errors)
- rurban 9y agoBasically the same as in space exploration. Also running at very low MHz.
- spyspy 9y agoNon-mobile link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/science/japan-fukushima-nuclear-meltdown-fuel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/science/japan-fukushima-n...
- MilnerRoute 9y agoIf I'm reading the article right, the robots actually made this discovery back in July.
- wiz21c 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties 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...
- googletazer 9y agoSo you extrapolated what will happen to the spent nuclear fuel that already began to leak in some places and did the math? I'd like to see it.
- baron816 9y agoI’m not worried about how many people nuclear power kills every year. I’m worried about how many people it kills every hundred years. A major nuclear disaster, however unlikely, has the potential to kill millions of people and leave a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries. Just because we haven’t seen one on that scale yet, doesn’t mean we never will.
- Tarrosion 9y agoBy nuclear disaster do you mean weapons use or just a power generation accident? I've never heard of a power plant accident potentially leaving a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries, but if there is something please enlighten me!
- wruza 9y agoEvery year it kills 100 times less than every hundred years, that’s how average works, no matter what exact period you’re worried about. Also, no nuclear disaster ever killed millions — it is barely possible even with nuclear weapons. Relocation and financial risks, yes. Likelihood of such disaster is estimated to be too minor to not care about, say, “an asteroid kills the planet” movie scenario. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/scientists-say-nuclear-fuel-pools-pose-safety-health-risks-n577666 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/scientists-say-nuclear-... http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-waste/safer-storage-of-spent-fuel http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-waste/safer-stor...
- chiefalchemist 9y agoAs seen as another HN thread, seemingly relevant here as well: http://www.sciencealert.com/new-composite-material-reduces-helium-damage-fusion-reactors http://www.sciencealert.com/new-composite-material-reduces-h...
- SiempreViernes 9y ago> "... 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" -_-
- archgoon 9y agoWould 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.lbl.gov/SKliewer/Cosmic_Rays/Muons.htm http://cosmic.lbl.gov/SKliewer/Cosmic_Rays/Muons.htm [1] "Muons arrive at sea level with an average flux of about 1 muon per square centimeter per minute."
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoAren't muons terrestrial particles created by cosmic ray impacts on the atmosphere, though?
- archgoon 9y agoWell, yes; but calling them "exotic-in-the-sense-we-don't-talk-about-them-very-much-even-though-they-pass-by-all-the-time-that-got-created-when-an-actual-space-particle-that-wasn't-that-exotic-like-a-proton-or-helium-atom-hit-the-atmosphere particles called muons" doesn't quite roll off the tongue. :) They ultimately (and not in the we're all space dust sense, more like 2.2 microseconds ago sense) are caused by interactions with particles from outer space, so calling them space particles, isn't that bad. :) But yeah; it's does elide that aspect of them.
- SiempreViernes 9y agoYeah, 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".
- whichdan 9y agoIf anyone's interested in related reading, there's a manga called Ichi-F[0] that walks through the daily life at Fukushima Daiichi. [0] https://kodanshacomics.com/series/ichi-f/ https://kodanshacomics.com/series/ichi-f/
- scoggs 9y agoWow, thank you! The art is pretty good overall and the story seems well done enough. There are 39 chapters according to where I found it to read online but MyAnimeList (MAL) says 24 chapters from 3 volumes. More info on MAL here: https://myanimelist.net/manga/61341/1F__Fukushima_Daiichi_Genshiryoku_Hatsudensho_Annaiki?q=ichi-f https://myanimelist.net/manga/61341/1F__Fukushima_Daiichi_Ge...
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- uptown 9y agoEarly on there was considerable talk about the contaminating impact this might have on the Pacific. Has anything come of that?
- scott_karana 9y agoWater sampling happens frequently at various points near the reactor, all of which showed levels at expected bounds to date. Most of the scary charts were fake: https://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp https://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp
- AlleyTrotter 9y agoSO! it never made it to China LOL
- jenga22 9y agoI 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?
- prebrov 9y agoRobots 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/ http://mashable.com/2017/03/03/fukushima-robots-fail/
- vidarh 9y agoThat'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.
- littlestymaar 9y ago> I wonder what they do once the robot sees the uranium? I mean the robot itself is now heavily contaminated. Contamination isn't as dramatic as you'd think, it's mostly superficial : you have radioactive dust sticking on the robot, and you "just" need to wash it thoroughly to remove the contamination. People usually have a wrong vision of radioactive contamination : they think being exposed to radiations makes you radioactive in return. In fact, it doesn't : being exposed to a radioactive material (which means you get struck by gamma rays, alpha and/or beta particles) doesn't make you radioactive. You can get contaminated with radioactive dust (which is a real problem if you ingest or inhale it, since it's hard to wash there) but you don't become radioactive yourself. The mistake didn't appear out of nowhere though : things exposed to neutrons becomes radioactive (they become activated) and neutrons are emitted by nuclear fission, which occur in a exploding atomic bomb or a working nuclear plant. But when the plant shuts down, the chain reaction stops and so does the neutron emission. All that remain is radioactivity, as fission products keep decaying. That being said, in practice I'm not sure the electronics in the robot is in a good enough shape to be used again …
- exabrial 9y agoWhat causes a robots electronics to go bad in radioactive environments?
- robinwassen 9y agoThe YouTube video with images of the core that nytimes linked, is one of those spam news videos using text-to-speech.
- themodelplumber 9y agoI was wondering about that. Was about to adjust my false-positive filter for YouTube click spam. I mean, if the NYT links to it...
- geon 9y ago> https://youtu.be/c5hQ6WlioRE 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.
- petepete 9y agoYouTube really should be detecting and pushing them to the bottom of search results. Downvoting doesn't appear to have much of an effect.
- jimcsharp 9y agoI believe likes and dislikes on Youtube both count as "interaction" as far as rankings are concerned.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoWon't matter much in this case as it's heavily linked to by all kinds of news outlets.
- thesmok 9y agoNo it shouldn't. Sometimes videos like this one are a source of unique information.
- usertrjx 9y agoI think you're lucky a fax was not involved.
- crankylinuxuser 9y agoI've seen a few of those before. Some were CC text from CNN articles with random "war pictures". It was surreal - like a badly done brainwashing video. It had the eerie qualities of belonging as perverse art exhibit. I have also seen these in "alt"/neonazi/kkk politics channels. There's not much worse than showing pictures of the KKK and black people while a robotic voice throws curse words and racial epithets. There isn't much else to say other than "WAT?"
- eric-hu 9y agoI long believed that nuclear power was the only energy source cleaner than fossil fuels and scalable enough to meet the energy demands of the world. While that might still be true in some sense, I now believe that humanity isn't ready for nuclear power. Besides the Fukushima and Chernobyl type issues with organizations skimping on design, there's still an outstanding problem of nuclear waste storage. The current nuclear power statistics haven't factored in a major waste storage incident because one hasn't happened yet. Until we've witnessed multiple lifecycles of nuclear fuel consumption to full waste breakdown, the safety stats could still swing against nuclear power. Maybe all it'd take is a terrorist incident involving nuclear waste. From what I understand, breeder reactors can vastly reduce the quantity of a power plant's waste and produce waste with a much shorter half life. This isn't widely implemented or shared because that technology can also be used to produce weapons grade material. I think humanity will be ready if/when we can sort out our differences without violence and greed/corruption are no longer problems for most large orgs. Additionally, renewables seem to have better scalability today than they did in the 90's when I formed my initial opinions. Right now, the worst case situation with a renewable power source is probably a large dam bursting. That's certainly possible due to corruption or terrorism too. If the three gorges dam suddenly burst, that could take out most of Shanghai. For most other renewables, the potential worst case is much milder though.
- cel1ne 9y agoIsn't there also the issue of fuel-reserves (uranium etc.) actually not lasting more than about 50-100 years?
- eric-hu 9y agoYeah, that's an issue too, though again, breeder reactors could extend that number significantly. But the countries that possess that tech don't want to use it widely or share it. Not sure if the former is due to cost or lack of expertise. The latter is definitely due to distrust in humanity.
- gizmo 9y agoI agree that renewables are a very good alternative to nuclear power, but in practice moving away from nuclear means doubling down on coal. The problems with nuclear are political, but the alternatives to nuclear power are mired in political conflict as well. As for your dam bursting scenario, something like that actually happened in the 70s when the Banqiao Dam burst. Nearly 200.000 people died. Fukushima had 0 radiation deaths.
- gnu8 9y agoWhy in fuck is this a link to mobile?