I thought Japan was the home of robots. Why haven't any been used at the

power plant? I'm not talking about the humanoid version:



but rather the kind bomb squads use:



What about a Mars Rover?

:shrug:

and Three Mile Island disasters, and they've finally moved a robot to the site from a different nuclear installation.

I read somewhere that the real reason was "budget constraints" and "denial." Meaning, they didn't want to spend the money for something they thought they wouldn't need.

Am not sure this is even a reasonable inquiry considering the chaos, the damage, the lack of just about everything available there right now.

and the Russians used them at Chernobyl.

Why didn't the Japanese have them? "Budget constraints and denial." In other words, the power company didn't want to invest the money and thought they weren't needed.

and continuing large earthquakes. Seems like comparing apples to oranges IMO.

long.

in previous nuclear disasters. But the Japanese power company decided to save some money and not invest in them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2bExqhhWRI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-AGWq0k_Mo check for "Big Dog" on youtube for more


oooh, now it's without an umbilical, check the side links for a climbing bot & a water-skimmer/walking bot

They can't just be diverted to other uses. I don't think a trumpet-playing robot would be very useful at Fukushima. Nor could a robot designed to handle bombs on street corners. There are no general robots that can do whatever you want them to do. Robots are very specific in their design, and the design of each one takes a long time. Sorry.

"While robots are commonplace in the nuclear power industry, with EU engineers building one that can climb walls through radioactive fields, the electric power company running Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has not deployed any for the nuclear emergency."

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/technology/Japan+robot+power+everywhere+except+nuclear+plant/4456313/story.html

Building one now won't work. If they didn't have them before, they don't have them. Just as I said. Robots are built for specific functions. Should they have built some? Probably. If they had, they could use them. If they didn't, they don't have them.

but the power companies apparently were trying to save money.

That's a lesson we should be learning from now. It's time to look at all our nuclear facilities with an eye to making them safer. And robots are one way to reduce human exposure to radiation risks in this sort of emergency.

nuclear power generation is not safe. It has never been safe, nor can it be built to be safe. That is the lesson. No number of robots would have prevented what happened at Fukushima. An earthquake and tsunami saw to that. Do you know of an earthquake prevention robot? I sure don't. The answer is to shut down all currently operating nuclear power plants and remove their fuel rods. Then, those rods need to be stored in a way that will prevent them from contaminating the planet further. That's the lesson that needs to be learned, and is the lesson I've been trying to put forward since 1959, when a small nuclear plant had a meltdown just a few miles from my boyhood home. See my journal for the story.

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/technology/Japan+robot+power+everywhere+except+nuclear+plant/4456313/story.html

While robots are commonplace in the nuclear power industry, with EU engineers building one that can climb walls through radioactive fields, the electric power company running Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has not deployed any for the nuclear emergency.

Instead, its skeleton team has been given the unenviable and perhaps deadly task of cooling reactors and spent nuclear fuel on their own, only taking breaks to avoid over-exposure.

SNIP

Kim, a deputy director in nuclear technology for the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, said budget constraints and denial have kept emergency robots out of many plants in his country and around the world.

"Nuclear plant operators don’t liked to think about serious situations that are beyond human control," he said by telephone.

_______________________________

I did read somewhere that a couple days ago they FINALLY brought one in from another nuclear facility. But they should have these in place at EVERY nuclear facility.

robots

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/japan-robots-to-fix-troubled-nuclear-reactors

that would have still provided useful information and saved some human exposure.

There's no reason except cost that kept them from having robotic systems in place to the same extent they're used elsewhere.

(The one robot that is mentioned in the article was shipped there several days after the earthquake from a different nuclear installation in Japan.)

http://robots.net/article/3125.html

A radiation monitoring robot, dubbed Monirobo ("monitor" + "robot") (source), developed by Japan's Nuclear Safety Technology Center (NUSTEC), has been deployed to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. While possibly the only robot being brought into play which had been specifically designed for use in a nuclear accident, it's far from the only robot to be deployed, or at least offerred for deployment during the recovery phase of the current disaster in Japan.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/irobot-sending-packbots-and-warriors-to-fukushima

The Special Ops group of Japan's Self Defense Forces has asked iRobot for some robotic assistance with the situation at the Fukushima Dai-1 nuclear plant, where several reactors are dangerously unstable after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake followed by a tsunami led to failures of their cooling systems last week.

Four robots, including iRobot's Packbot 510 and Warrior 710, left Bedford, Mass., this morning on their way to Japan, along with a team of iRobot employees to provide support, an iRobot spokesperson told me.