Of all the stories to emerge from disaster-ravaged Japan, one of the most inspiring and heart wrenching concerned the workers at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility who understood the grave risks the plant’s leaking radiation meant to their health and yet carried on with their desperate attempts to avert a full-blown meltdown.
Today, the LA Times reported that the Japanese have turned to the U.S. military for help, and that as a first step in that assistance, the military was planning to use drone planes to survey the plant. There has been other accounts that robots of one kind or another were being readied for use at the plant, but the LA Times article provided the first substantive account – which begs the question, why has it taken so long for robots to join the effort, especially given the fact that Japan arguably leads the world in many areas of robotic technology, as a Reuters article noted.
If a team of robots perhaps similar to the NASA/GM Robonaut 2 humanoid robot that recently deployed on the International Space Station could have facilitated repairs the Fukushima story might have been one of technology triumphing over disaster. Instead, it is a story of heroic, yet tragic human sacrifice.
How then might we insure that future disasters, which create an environment unsafe for humans, could be mitigated through the use of robotics? Since the technology largely exists and is available commercially, the answer lies in planning and creating the necessary systems to respond effectively if ever a nuclear accident occurs.
On March 17, President Obama ordered the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review of the safety of America’s 104 nuclear power plants, a move likely to be echoed by many other nations in the coming weeks. That review should call for detailed plans of how robots could step in should an accident occur at each and every one of the reactors.
As a first step, 3D virtual maps of the insides of America’s reactors that robots could use to aide their navigation should be created. Then, just as plant workers rehearse what they need to do in a disaster, robots should be programmed and tested on performing the possible tasks they would be required to perform at each plant. The NRC might also consider assembling a collection of varying types of robots along with support systems and expert handlers that could be quickly airlifted to a specific plant.
This has already occurred on a small scale. Robots assisted in the Three-Mile Island clean-up, as Scientific American reports, and they also were called into service in the late 1990s‘ when NASA and private companies designed a robot to inspect the Ukraine’s Chernobyl reactor. A quick Google search reveals that the idea has been written about in a number of studies, such as this one from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Assembling the varying pieces necessary to put together an effective response, would not only make America’s nuclear power industry a safer contributor to this nation’s energy independence, it would greatly advance the field of robotics.
