Japan nuclear plant gets help from US robots | World news. Peter Lyons, who told a Senate committee that robots were being sent to Japan. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images The Obama administration is sending a squad of robots to Japan to help efforts to regain control over the Fukushima nuclear plant, it has emerged. "A shipment is being readied," Peter Lyons, who oversees nuclear power in the department of energy, told a Senate committee. "The government of Japan is very, very interested in the capabilities that could be brought to bear from this country. " The news came amid growing fears about the status of the plant's No2 reactor, one of three which workers have been pumping water into in an effort to keep the fuel rods from melting down.
Richard Lahey, who worked as a safety research officer at General Electric when it installed the plant's units, said part of the molten core seemed to have sunk through the steel 'lower head' of the pressure vessel and on to the concrete floor below. Pavel Podvig: Am I the only one who thin... Jeffrey Lewis: Chernobyl didn't get 24/7... David E. Hoffman: @ArmsControlWonk But Chern... Opinion / Lead : Nuclear power after Fukushima. The difficulty in bringing Japan's nuclear crisis under control has undoubtedly put a serious question mark over the entire issue of nuclear power. Even if it is as yet unclear how the Japanese nuclear emergency will play itself out, it is certain that the town of Fukushima in Japan, familiar hitherto only to a few, will enter the global nuclear lexicon alongside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
The difficulty in bringing the nuclear crisis under control, a crisis precipitated by a series of accidents and failures while negotiating a safe shutdown of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power complex in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, has undoubtedly put a serious question mark over the entire issue of nuclear power. What drives home the gravity of the situation is that this nuclear emergency, we would have been told earlier, is one that would never happen.
Unfortunately, the post-shock scenario has rewritten all these perceptions.
Timeline : Fukushima nuclear nightmare. More Links on the Japanese Reactor Situation. I've been off-line for most of today, enjoying the company of friends. Back to the news. I do have another post on parallels between the Russian Revolution and events in the Middle East almost ready to go, but the situation in Japan is more immediate. I am having trouble reaching the Tepco site; the server is probably overloaded. Graphics from the Washington Post on the nuclear reactors. Another summary of what's happening at Fukushima, this one from the Union of Concerned Scientists. And another, from The Guardian.
World Nuclear News is providing continuing coverage. Why I am not worried about Japan's nuclear reactors, by Josef Oehmen, an MIT scientist. More about the isotopes being released from the reactors. CDC fact sheet on how radiation doses are measured (pdf). Jerome á Paris provides some context in relation to economics and other energy sources. The Neutron Economy is a new blog from a graduate student. Background on the Three Mile Island accident. Cirincione/Japan Nuclear Resources... Physicist James M. Acton on Japan's damaged reactors - Nightly News. American Nuclear Society Backgrounder on Japan.