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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
by 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 agoI 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 agoHanford 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.