#Fukushima I Nuke Plant: Robot "Quince" Video Inside Reactor 3

TEPCO released the video of the robot "Quince" going inside the Reactor 3's reactor building on July 26.

No information released yet on the effort by human workers on July 27.

According to tweets by a worker at Fukushima I Nuke Plant, TEPCO seems quickly running out of workers with low enough cumulative radiation, as the work these days has to be done inside the reactor buildings with very high radiation. He says TEPCO and the government are not involved in hiring of the workers at all, and it is left to the subcontractors to find workers. But they are having a hard time finding workers willing to work in an environment where they will reach the annual radiation limit in 2 weeks (I hope he's not talking about 250 millisieverts/year emergency limit) for an increasingly lower pay as the middlemen take cuts.

He seems to have been doing the indoor work himself, carrying equipment, pipes and lead shields up the stairs in the reactor building (Reactor 4, probably). He says:

"Robots may be able to go in and measure radiation, but the actual work has to be done by humans."

"Since all the elevators inside the reactor buildings have been destroyed, we have to carry everything up the stairs on foot. If I climb slow, I'll get more radiation. But if I climb fast, I'll be tired out quickly. It's difficult to pace myself..."

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#Fukushima I Nuke Plant: Quince Entered Reactor 3, Now Humans' Turn to Brave 75 Millisieverts/Hr Radiation

so that TEPCO can conserve water that is being injected into the RPVs.

The robot "Quince" went to the 2nd floor of Reactor 3's reactor building at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant on July 26 and measured the radiation. It was as high as 75 millisieverts/hour on the 2nd floor. To help "Quince", 6 TEPCO employees went to the reactor building (I don't think they were inside the building), and received maximum 2.22 millisieverts of radiation.

TEPCO's handout for the press on July 27, radiation measurement by Quince:

No radiation level is too high for carbon-based workers in the time of crisis, and TEPCO is sending 6 of them up the stairs to the 2nd and 3rd floors of Reactor 3 on July 27. However, the amount of time the workers spend inside the reactor building will be limited, according to TEPCO. The workers are to conduct the survey to determine whether it is possible to hook up the water injection system to the ECCS (emergency core cooling system) pipe, so that the water could be poured directly over the melted fuel (if there's melted fuel left in the RPV, that is) and thus more efficient (i.e. using less water) in cooling the fuel.

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#Fukushima I Nuke Plant: Robot "Quince" Is Back, Measuring Radiation in Reactor 2 Bldg

The Japanese robot "Quince", who got stuck on the stairs leading to the Reactor 2 basement and had to be rescued by carbon colleagues back in June, completed a successful mission of entering the reactor building in Reactor 2, and this time climbing up the stairs to the 2nd and the 3rd floors, and measuring air radiation. The feat was accomplished on July 8.

TEPCO's handouts for the press on July 11:

Air samples taken on the 2nd and 3rd floor still have slight amount of iodine-131, and a lot of radioactive cesium. The measurement unit is becquerels per cubic centimeter.

TEPCO says the radiation is too high for human workers (up to 50 millisieverts/hour), which is a bit odd considering the company didn't have any problem sending in human workers into Reactor 1 which had the radiation level as high as 1,000 millisieverts/hour (or 1 sievert/hour) on the 2nd floor of the reactor building, and the 1st floor was not much better.

But that was back in the beginning of May. TEPCO's sudden unwillingness to have the workers risk radiation indicates to me that the company may be running thin on skilled workers with low radiation exposure, both at TEPCO and affiliate companies, and wants to conserve on the radiation dose for them. In the press conference on July 10 (morning), I heard them say they are not letting workers continue to work once they exceed 150 millisieverts of cumulative radiation exposure, even if the regulation has been relaxed to 250 millisieverts after the accident.

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Made-In-Japan Robot "Quince" Joined the Also-Failed at #Fukushima I Nuke Plant

Kurion's water treatment system underperformed by a vast margin, T-Hawk crashed on the roof of the Reactor 2 building, and now the Japanese robot "Quince" got caught in a bad juju at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.

"Quince" was designed and developed by Chiba Institute of Technology, and was going to install the water gauge for the highly contaminated water (radiation near the surface of water was 430 millisieverts/hour the other day) in the basement of the Reactor 2's reactor building.

(Photo is from CIT's site. You can see how it is supposed to work here on Youtube.)

Quince tried to go there in the morning of June 24, but it got stuck in the stairway leading to the basement, and had to be retrieved by the carbon-based workers.

From AP Tokyo (6/24/2011):

The Quince robot, developed by Chiba Institute of Technology for nuclear and biological disaster relief activity, had ventured out into the Unit 2 reactor building to set up a gauge to measure the contaminated water pooling in the basement. Radioactivity inside the reactor buildings is too high for workers to take measurements there.

The machine got stuck at a staircase landing and failed to go downstairs, TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said. A cable that was supposed to drop a gauge into the basement also malfunctioned.

The workers retrieved the robot and were going to make adjustments before sending it back in for another try, Matsumoto said. He did not elaborate.

TEPCO's handout for the press doesn't make any mention of it, although it does mention the crashed T-Hawk.

By the way, the above AP article, just like any other reports by the Japan-based media, continues to say:

TEPCO and the government have said they hope to achieve a cold shutdown of the reactors by January by bringing the core temperatures to below 100 Celsius (212 Fahrenheit.)

A "cold shutdown" cannot even be defined for a broken reactor where the fuel core had melted away along with control rods and other in-vessel equipment and got out of the Reactor Pressure Vessel and probably out of the Containment Vessel. The RPV is broken, and so is the Containment Vessel. Sure, TEPCO measures temperature of the RPVs, but what does that mean, when the corium is already out of the RPVs? How could a temperature of a broken RPV be an indication for a "cold shutdown"? Do they know how hot the escaped corium is, or where exactly the corium is right now?

Do reporters ask such questions?

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