Fukushima Cleanup Efforts Still Failing
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster happened over 5 years ago and authorities tasked with the cleanup are still having issues with containing the incident. After investigations took place, it was determined that the incident had been caused by foreseeable circumstances and allegedly TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) had failed to meet certain basic safety standards regarding risk assessment of the plant and more.
The Fukushima disaster is credited as the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl back in 1986.
Since the earthquake and disaster took place, tons of contaminated water has leaked into the ocean from the nuclear plant. In the surrounding area, researchers also claim that they have found malformations in mammals, birds, and trees. Even despite asking the international community for help with the cleanup, they are still struggling to take a look inside of the contaminated area.
Just recently, TEPCO released new images that were taken from a new robot that they had developed which was designed to be able to go deep into the damaged reactor and take images of the area so they could analyze it. Their robot failed 5x faster than the team expected it to, it failed when it was about 10 feet away from the target area that it was meant to survey.
Radiation levels are said to be about 650 sieverts per hour.
The robots that the company keeps trying to use to assess the problem, continue dying on them. The newest robot that they had, failed at 73 sieverts, despite it being allegedly designed to withstand 1,000 sieverts. And if they can't get a robot to work for them then they are going to be unable to search the bottom of the reactor. They estimate that there might be hundreds of tons of fuel debris which likely poured out of the reactor.
The robot that they had planned on recently doing the job was designed by Toshiba. It was referred to as the Scorpion robot and the company isn't sure yet if its failure was due to radiation or debris.
So far this nuclear disaster incident has already cost the Japanese government well over $180 billion and they aren't close to being finished.
The president of Fukushima Daiichi Decommissioning has publicly urged for out-of-the-box thinking on this one, in trying to think of how they might be able to come up with a way to examine the bottom area of the core and analyze how the melted fuel debris possibly spread out. Hopefully someone will be able to come up with an innovative solution to try and help solve the problem.
Pics:
Standford News
Extreme Tech
Phys
Sources:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/245324-cant-see-inside-fukushima-daiichi-robots-keep-dying
http://www.ibtimes.com/fukushima-news-deadly-nuclear-radiation-levels-baffle-scientists-trying-build-robot-2502250
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/robots-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-dying-probe-clean-up-tepco-toshiba-reactor-nuclear-radiation-a7612396.html
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-scorpion-robot-mission-fukushima-reactor.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/fukushima-a-nuclear-war-without-a-war-the-unspoken-crisis-of-worldwide-nuclear-radiation/28870
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Again, you have shared an informative and interesting post, thanks.
thanks mary! I appreciate your support and kind words.
cheers
This is still happening and we, on the West Coast of North America are starting to see impacts of it in our food chain: The wild Pacific Salmon have traces of radiation signed Fukushima all over them. This is a very bad sign for the entire coast, very bad. A positively creative solution needs to be found a.s.a.p.
Namaste
What a crazy world...
This is the first post and horrific image I see this morning and my stomach feels sick. What a disaster this is and I don't think robots can help that much. I am sure that we don't know the whole truth from the Japanese government.
Do we know any aliens? We need transport to one of those new goldielocks planets or some radiation devouring technology....or we're all in big trouble.
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