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Digital Globe, CC BY-SA 3.0
13 years ago, one among the worst nuclear disasters in history occurred when a record-breaking earthquake and following tsunami resulted in flooding – and subsequent nuclear meltdown – on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. In the times that followed, there have been heroic stories of plant retirees volunteering to go in to the plant to assist minimize the danger to others. Since then, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) has been steadily engaged in efforts to securely decommission the plant.
Applications just like the Fukishima drone survey represent the last word purpose of uncrewed systems: to perform the dark, dirty, and dangerous jobs and to maintain human personnel out of harms way. TEPCO announced recently that they’ve accomplished testing of the primary drones to be deployed to the Fukushima Daiichi plant as a part of its decades-long decommissioning process.
The drones shall be deployed alongside a snake-shaped robot in February of 2024, so as to survey the damage on the Unit 1 reactor. The deployment shall be the primary time that a drone will enter the reactor to offer an understanding of the damage above water, World Energy reports.
While the technique of removing molten fuel from the positioning will take many years, drones may help by providing data from parts of the reactors that were previously inaccessible. Experts have attempted to make use of drones within the space previously, but extreme levels of radiation, debris and cluttered environments have made them impractical.
The brand new drones that TEPCO plans to deploy in February are “the scale of a slice of bread,” the Associated Press reports. These drones were demonstrated on the Japan Atomic Energy Agency’s mockup facility in Naraha.
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