The Yomiuri Shimbun
Taisei Corp. on Wednesday announced plans to introduce unmanned heavy machines to speedily clear away highly radioactive rubble at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
The March 11 earthquake-tsunami disaster has left huge amounts of rubble at the plant, posing an obstacle to efforts to defuse the ongoing crisis. However, since the rubble is contaminated with high levels of radiation, workers cannot spend lengthy periods in cleanup efforts.
However, this dilemma could be solved by introducing remote-controlled, unmanned bulldozers, power shovels, dump trucks and other heavy machinery, said the construction company.
These machines and control systems, using wireless local area networks and global positioning systems, were developed by the Unmanned Construction System Association in Tokyo, a consortium of 15 construction and related companies.
As such unmanned machines can be used in places too dangerous for workers, they have been used at more than 100 sites including restoration work at the Mt. Fugen volcano in Nagasaki Prefecture, which erupted with large pyroclastic flows in 1991, and Hokkaido's Mt. Usu, where a volcanic eruption occurred in 2000.
After the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in the United States, remote-controlled robots were used to remove nuclear fuel, do restoration work in radiation-contaminated water and measure radioactivity levels inside the plant.
Their good track record has prompted countries around the world to accelerate research and development of robots to work at nuclear facilities.
(Mar. 31, 2011)
No comments:
Post a Comment