3 ms·

There will also be a lot of really cool work in tethered and/or autonomous robotics.

by narrator 4y ago

ge96 4y ago
Automata (film)
- narrator 4y ago
  I was reading about a lot of these nuclear cleanup projects at Hanford and Fukushima and the only way to do it is with specially designed robots that are highly radiation resistant. This is difficult since the radiation regularly causes them to glitch out permanently and radio communication doesn't really work with that much radiation around. They usually have to be tethered to be controllable. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/26/16030222/fukushima-nuclear-power-plant-robot-radioactive-fuel-tepco-little-sunfish https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/26/16030222/fukushima-nuclea...
  - ge96 4y ago
    I see that is pretty interesting. Surprised hardening isn't enough. My comment was more on humanoid robots being powered by small nuclear batteries.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Hanford is a different situation from Fukushima in that the wastes have had a long time to decay at Hanford but Fukushima is still pretty fresh. The trouble at Hanford was that the current methods for reprocessing produce a stream of fission product raffinates that they originally stored in liquid form in tanks. Later on the technology was developed to trap the fission products in glass which is not too hard to dispose of (and that decays mostly in 500 years) but the Hanford tanks had started to fail before then. Future reprocessing plants will store liquid waste temporarily but like THORP in the UK and COGEMA in France they will plan on vitrification from day one.
PaulHoule 4y ago
The tough problem in the plutonium economy is not extracting plutonium from spent fuel but fabricating that plutonium into fuel. The "gold standard" today is to pulverize plutonium oxide together with uranium oxide in a high energy ball mill which produces homogeneous fuel that won't come apart. That makes nanoparticles of plutonium which you could potentially inhale and have lodge deep in your lungs. Experiments in dogs show a single particle can develop a cancerous tumor. Handling the fuel pellets is a high touch operation (you gotta pick up the pellets with gloves and load them in the fuel rod) and there's a lot of controversy about safety. France has workers at COGEMA wear a respirator all the time, the U.S. doesn't accept that as safe working conditions. Both the U.S. and U.K. failed to import mixed oxide technology from France. Russia was looking at a different method of fuel processing they called "vibropacking" but for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor they adopted something like the French process. Some advance in remote handling that keeps workers away from the dust would be welcome.
- jabl 4y ago
  Pyroprocessing was AFAIU developed so it could be done completely hands off. But that produces metallic fuel which is poorly suited to water cooled reactors.

There will also be a lot of really cool work in tethered and/or autonomous robotics.

ge96 4y ago

Automata (film)

narrator 4y ago
I was reading about a lot of these nuclear cleanup projects at Hanford and Fukushima and the only way to do it is with specially designed robots that are highly radiation resistant. This is difficult since the radiation regularly causes them to glitch out permanently and radio communication doesn't really work with that much radiation around. They usually have to be tethered to be controllable. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/26/16030222/fukushima-nuclear-power-plant-robot-radioactive-fuel-tepco-little-sunfish https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/26/16030222/fukushima-nuclea...
- ge96 4y ago
  I see that is pretty interesting. Surprised hardening isn't enough. My comment was more on humanoid robots being powered by small nuclear batteries.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Hanford is a different situation from Fukushima in that the wastes have had a long time to decay at Hanford but Fukushima is still pretty fresh. The trouble at Hanford was that the current methods for reprocessing produce a stream of fission product raffinates that they originally stored in liquid form in tanks. Later on the technology was developed to trap the fission products in glass which is not too hard to dispose of (and that decays mostly in 500 years) but the Hanford tanks had started to fail before then. Future reprocessing plants will store liquid waste temporarily but like THORP in the UK and COGEMA in France they will plan on vitrification from day one.

PaulHoule 4y ago

The tough problem in the plutonium economy is not extracting plutonium from spent fuel but fabricating that plutonium into fuel. The "gold standard" today is to pulverize plutonium oxide together with uranium oxide in a high energy ball mill which produces homogeneous fuel that won't come apart. That makes nanoparticles of plutonium which you could potentially inhale and have lodge deep in your lungs. Experiments in dogs show a single particle can develop a cancerous tumor. Handling the fuel pellets is a high touch operation (you gotta pick up the pellets with gloves and load them in the fuel rod) and there's a lot of controversy about safety. France has workers at COGEMA wear a respirator all the time, the U.S. doesn't accept that as safe working conditions. Both the U.S. and U.K. failed to import mixed oxide technology from France. Russia was looking at a different method of fuel processing they called "vibropacking" but for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor they adopted something like the French process. Some advance in remote handling that keeps workers away from the dust would be welcome.

jabl 4y ago
Pyroprocessing was AFAIU developed so it could be done completely hands off. But that produces metallic fuel which is poorly suited to water cooled reactors.