Friday, March 30, 2012
Fukushima reactor explosion
Reactors inside Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant are still too hot for man and machine to get close enough to assess the damage from last year’s disaster.
Radiation levels inside reactor No. 2’s containment vessel are so high—(73 sieverts per hour)—that scout robots can only function properly for two to three hours in the hot zone, which is insufficient time for experts to gauge the situation.
Any person entering the building would die after just seven minutes of exposure. A fatal dose of radiation is considered to be 8 sieverts in an hour.
Scientists will need to develop a robot capable of withstanding extremely high levels of radiation before officials will have a full understanding of the reactors’ conditions.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
To Learn More
Reactor 2 Radiation Too High for Access (by Minoru Matsutani, Japanese Times)
Japan Nuclear Plant May Be Worse Off Than Thought (by Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times)
Fukushima Radioactive Fallout Much Worse than Previously Reported (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)
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