Posted on 04/08/2011 8:15:05 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
April 7, 2011
From Safe Distance, U.S.-Japanese Team Draws Up Plan to Demolish Reactors
By KEN BELSON
TOKYO — Hydrogen explosions. High levels of radiation. Thousands of gallons of contaminated water dumped into the sea. With the drumbeat of bad news, including another powerful aftershock on Thursday, it will take months, if not years, to stabilize the reactors and spent fuel pools that were damaged in last month’s earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Yet it is not too soon for a team of engineers from Japan and the United States to begin working on the thorny task of how to dismantle the reactors, four of which are so badly damaged that the plant’s operator has said they will be scrapped.
Already, dozens of engineers from Toshiba, which helped build four of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, have been joined by experts from the United States to prepare for the decommissioning work, a job so big that the planning needs to start even now, in parallel with the efforts to contain the crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
P!
Maybe this will spark the development of a whole new generation of industrial robots to first pick up and haul off all the debris and secondly to dismantle as much as possible and thirdly to do the dangerous close-in work of entombment.
3CP0 is just a translator droid.
It is perhaps (mildly) interesting to note that according to the report, GE is not among the US participants.
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