Showing posts with label surface boat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label surface boat. Show all posts

Friday, November 15, 2013

#Fukushima I Nuke Plant Reactor 1: Surface Boat in the Flooded Torus Room Finds Two Leaks from the Dry Well (CV)


The small boat that can, fitted with video camera and dosimeter, boldly going where no humans can ever go (ambient air dose of 1.8 SIEVERT/hour max).

The boat was lowered from a hole (510mm in diameter) drilled on the floor of the 1st floor of Reactor 1 into the torus room which is flooded with highly contaminated water leaking from the dry well.

The surface boat, by Hitachi Nuclear Energy (from TEPCO's Photos and Videos Library 11/13/2013):


The route of the surface boat (red for November 13 expedition, blue for November 14):


Leak 1: the upper part of the S/C facing side of the vent pipe at the location [4] (S/C = Suppression Chamber):


Leak 2: The sand cushion drain pipe at the location [1]:


The video taken by the boat:



(Oh my goodness, what are they capturing in the lower left screen? It looks like some organic materials growing on the metal surface...)

The boat looks to be tethered, meaning human workers from Hitachi Nuclear Energy were operating it from the 1st floor of the Reactor 1 building which has rather high air dose levels (unlike Reactor 4, the levels in Reactor 1 is in millisievert/hour, with several locations in sievert/hour). There is no information as to the radiation exposure for the workers who operated the boat.

Now, we need a little submarine that could to dive under the water in the torus room and check the damage on the Suppression Chamber and the surrounding walls.

And a swarm of self-organizing, self-propelled small flying robots for the upper floor surveys, and an army of soldier ant robots to eat away the irradiated concrete debris on the operating floors and inside the Spent Fuel Pools of Reactor 3 and Reactor 4.