Robot Cthulhu?

[EricW]

Scientists building robots with tentacles which extend across or through difficult terrain.

Their vision is in a rescue situation, a bunch of long robot tentacles would enter a building and search for the humans.

 

[Lloyd Dupont]

Hey.. we are watching the same videos! 🙂
Veritasium is great!

 

BTW, in the video, they try the robot in Peru in an ancient temple... just as I am reading the Masks of Nyarlathotep.... OMG! They are going to awake the Father of Maggots! 😮

Edited April 17, 2021 by Lloyd Dupont

[Darius West]

This could have been a huge help at the Fukushima, if Tepco hadn't opted for the "Fuk u" in Fukushima instead.

[EricW]

20 hours ago, Darius West said:

This could have been a huge help at the Fukushima, if Tepco hadn't opted for the "Fuk u" in Fukushima instead.

Maybe. Radiation messes up electronics pretty good, so the sensor package on the end of the tentacle would have been messed up just as quickly as the sensor package on a regular robot. Fukushima radiation levels exceeded Chernobyl at one point. 

Fukushima was a really dumb design, passive safe reactors which won't melt down under any circumstances have been designed and tested.  

I'm a big fan of nuclear reactors, despite the occasional horrible accident. One day nuclear reactors will save us all, but cutting short the dark age after our civilisation collapses.

In the 1977 sci-fi book Lucifer's Hammer, about a civilisation shattering series of comet strikes, one of the few remaining centres of civilisation was a nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactors, at least the western design, are tough, and they don't need to be refuelled very often - especially if power demand drops to a trickle, because most of the previous customers are currently too busy fighting off cannibal religious crazies to show up for work on Monday.

[Darius West]

On 4/23/2021 at 7:30 PM, EricW said:

Maybe. Radiation messes up electronics pretty good, so the sensor package on the end of the tentacle would have been messed up just as quickly as the sensor package on a regular robot. Fukushima radiation levels exceeded Chernobyl at one point. 

You are right of course.  Wherever possible a nuclear clean-up robot would need to replace electronics with alternative systems like micro hydraulics or rod logic I think.  I am surprised that more thought hasn't gone into the development of systems of this sort.

The main problem with electricity from nuclear reactors is that the entire industry was predicated on the desire to produce nuclear weapons during the cold war.  The actual energy production was a secondary concern at best.  Due to this, in many ways the entire nuclear energy industry is still, 30 years later, at something of a technical infancy with respect to putting energy production first.  The largest  step forwards has been the development of thorium reactors, which are far safer in terms of accidents and in terms of security against terrorism.  Tepco had been resting on its laurels since before we were born.

[EricW]

On 4/27/2021 at 10:23 PM, Darius West said:

You are right of course.  Wherever possible a nuclear clean-up robot would need to replace electronics with alternative systems like micro hydraulics or rod logic I think.  I am surprised that more thought hasn't gone into the development of systems of this sort.

The main problem with electricity from nuclear reactors is that the entire industry was predicated on the desire to produce nuclear weapons during the cold war.  The actual energy production was a secondary concern at best.  Due to this, in many ways the entire nuclear energy industry is still, 30 years later, at something of a technical infancy with respect to putting energy production first.  The largest  step forwards has been the development of thorium reactors, which are far safer in terms of accidents and in terms of security against terrorism.  Tepco had been resting on its laurels since before we were born.

Its not all the nuclear industry's fault. Can you imagine the approval process for a totally new design? There is a huge perverse incentive to stick to existing designs, however unsafe. A civil servant or politician who approves a design which is identical to a previously approved design is less exposed to accusations they did something reckless.

Just making the cores smaller would be enough. Surface area to volume ratio is important for nuclear reactions, neutrons escape through the surface. The more surface you have, the harder it is to sustain a reaction.

Big cores inherently have a favourable surface to volume ratio, even if they melt into a puddle.

Small cores stop burning as soon as they start melting. Surface goes up with the square of the mass of core material, but volume goes up with the cube of the mass of core material. So a small core is much closer to not working than a big core - the moment a small core becomes deformed by melting or other disaster, the surface area increases (a flat puddle has more surface area than an elegantly engineered sphere), and the nuclear fission reaction stops.

But cores are approved on a per core basis - so there is a perverse incentive to build large, dangerous cores, to simplify the approval process.

 

[Darius West]

6 hours ago, EricW said:

Its not all the nuclear industry's fault. Can you imagine the approval process for a totally new design? There is a huge perverse incentive to stick to existing designs, however unsafe. A civil servant or politician who approves a design which is identical to a previously approved design is less exposed to accusations they did something reckless.

While there is undoubtedly an unfortunate amount of truth in what you are suggesting, the fact is that there have been a large number of nuclear energy patents that have been adopted well after the building of Tepco's plants in the 1960s, and with other plants around the world.  The industry has not been entirely sitting on its hands entirely, and has definitely been innovating in other parts of the world.  There is a contrary force that suggests that technical improvement will produce better and safer plants, than the older designs that have had their weaknesses revealed, and the fact is that more modern plants are far safer than the older ones.