Social Good Engineering Magazine: GineersNow Social Innovation GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue No. 001 | Page 95

Underwater bot
that will save
Fukushima
An underwater robot made by Toshiba
was built to scour the radioactive waters of
Fukushima’s worst-hit reactor and remove
fuel rods. After an earthquake and tsunami
demolished Japan’s Fukushima Daichii
Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, which caused
a dangerous radiation leak, the country
immediately planned to set robots to fix the
needed repairs. Unfortunately, the environ-
ment was too unstable for any normal robot
to venture into.

Since the incident, countless
efforts were made by different companies
to develop a robot that can do this complex
job. This inspired a national robot competi-
tion called the DARPA Robotics challenge,
which was designed to simulate rescue
efforts. This led to the development of
some robots that are capable of working in
unstructured or complex environments.

According to Japan Times,
Toshiba manufactured the worst-hit reactor
and is currently helping with the clean-up.
They created a two-armed submersible
robot that will float into reactor 3 and try to
remove debris and retrieve the reactor’s fuel
rods. The simplicity of the robot shows that,
sometimes the simplest robots are the best
for the job.

This underwater robot is expected
to embark on its mission sometime in 2018.
Though this may not be enough to make
the place safe for humans to go into, it is
certainly a major step
in cleaning the site.
An underwater robot made by
Toshiba was built toscour the
radioactive waters of Fukushi-
ma’s worst-hit reactor and
remove fuel rods.
Photo Source: Tech Insider
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