Sweden's Husqvarna Construction has announced that two of its remote-controlled demolition robots are to help with the massive clean-up operation at the site of the failed fourth reactor at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The recently-featured DXR-140 and its bigger brother - the DXR-310 - will be used in heavy demolition work such as tearing down concrete constructions and dealing with contaminated materials.
Both robots have been shipped to Takenaka Construction, the company in charge of the cleaning up the plant's fourth reactor after its failure in March of this year. They've been specially optimized for the demanding conditions they'll encounter, with the 31-inch (780 mm) wide, electric-motor-driven DXR-310 being kitted out with an onboard video camera and transmission equipment to extend its range and allow remote operation from a safe distance. It's also capable of climbing stairs, has a telescopic boom reach of 216 inches (5.48 meters), and features bright LED lights to illuminate the work area.
"Our robots are well adapted to this environment," says the company's Anders Ströby. "They are powerful, reliable and easy to maneuver, even in narrow spaces."
The clean-up operation at Fukushima is expected to continue for some time to come.
That\'s pretty much how all 40-something year old nuclear reactors were built, and they\'re still that way because the \"greens\" won\'t allow them to be updated, which would make them easier and safer to operate.
Those old reactors should have been updated years ago to modern control systems where instead of huge walls full of vintage lights, switches and gauges the control room would have a few control stations with monitors.
I am not apposed to augmenting the analogue instrumentation and controls with computers, but given the bugs, crackers, EMP events (natural and artificial), viruses and other malware I don\'t want the analogue systems abandoned.