Clean-up at Fukushima reactors halted due to too much radiation–even for robots. Wonder how the 8,000 human workers feel about that?
TEPCO and the Japanese Government Are Making a Life-Threatening Mess Out Of Cleaning Up Fukushima. There are Better Ways! Demand a Different Solution. Take Action Here: http://TinyURL.com/FukushimaHope
Fukushima clean-up efforts delayed again as radiation “kills” robot cleaning crew. Again.
In the ongoing slow-motion train wreck that is the clean-up effort at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, a new development has once again slowed the process to a crawl. This time officials have discovered that radiation levels are so high inside one damaged reactor that even their specially designed robots can’t survive.
The robots, created from scratch explicitly for the project of cleaning up Fukushima by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had their circuitry destroyed by the intense radiation.
TEPCO’s head of decommissioning, Naohiro Masuda explained, “It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant due to extraordinary levels of radiation.”
The robots, which took TEPCO engineers two years to design and build, were meant to “swim” around in pools of water inside the plant’s reactors, seeking out and recovering fuel rods. And indeed, in a different reactor, the same robots were used successfully. In that reactor 1,535 fuel rod assemblies have been removed, and workers were able to stand in close enough proximity to directly observe the operation.
But the radiation levels in the latest reactor to receive the robots are so high that it is impossible for either human or robot to survive the environment.
Five years have passed since the Fukushima plant was inundated by a massive tsunami wave and experienced the equipment failures that would lead to meltdowns and the release of radioactive material. Clean-up efforts have been frequently criticized since that time since they are riddled with corruption, cover-up and ineptitude. And the plant continues to leak highly radioactive material to this day.
The failure of the robots to perform their designed function shines a light anew on TEPCO, who has had a long string of failures and delays in the cleanup effort, which, and this cannot be stressed often enough, is still going on five years later.
Critics are quick to point out that from the beginning TEPCO had a hand in the Fukushima disaster. By using radiation monitoring equipment that tops out at an extremely low level, warnings and alarms failed to go off in a timely manner when the levels were far, far higher endangering workers, neighbors and, indeed, the entire world.
The cleanup effort has already been under substantial public scrutiny and this latest snafu won’t help the company’s reputation. They are under fire for pumping water into reactors to cool them and then storing the radioactive water in leaky, illegally-constructed water tanks, creating further nuclear contamination of the surrounding environment and releasing the incredibly dangerous runoff directly into the Pacific Ocean, storing high level radiation waste in tens of thousands of black plastic bags out in open for destruction in the monsoon rains and further contamination and many other similar atrocious failures of judgement and sense .
So perhaps the fact that ongoing leakage has been detected isn’t such a big surprise. What is surprising is that the crooks and incompetents at TEPCO have been left in charge of cleaning up the mess they created this long.
Certainly there’s a little schoolyard justice in making them take responsibility.
But surely the rest of humanity and the planet can no longer afford to wait around for them to get it together.
Fukushima must be remediated now and the only way to do it is to use modern, not ancient and inadequate, methods.
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http://sputniknews.com/environment/20160316/1036356942/tepco-bungles-fukushima-cleanup-again.html#ixzz4385OXnZO