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The nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2022 was the near significant since Chernobyl 25 years earlier. Cleanup efforts at the Japanese plant have been slowed past technical difficulties and hardware breakdowns. Recently, however, the Japanese have built a small-scale underwater robot, dubbed "Footling Sunfish," that can come across into the water beneath the melted Reactor #three inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The robot appears to take answered some critical questions about what happened to Reactor #iii's fuel supply in the hours following the earthquake and seismic sea wave that struck the found on March 11, 2022. Previous attempts to run into into the reactors themselves have been largely unsuccessful; the amount of radiation pouring off the melted-down reactor would turn your average man into a burned-out screaming meat boob within a second, and the overall radiation level was loftier enough to burn out robots within a affair of minutes, as nosotros discussed earlier this year.

Trivial Sunfish's power to penetrate the water pooled at the bottom of Reactor #3 is a major leap frontward for the cleanup endeavor. Information technology allows scientists to decide what radioactive material concluded upwards where within the structure.

Fukushima_MAAP_Report_Nov2011_–_Unit_1

This map shows the estimated layout of Fukushima Reactor #one. All vi reactors at Fukushima were of the same type, but we don't know if #3 sustained a unlike level of damage, having but confirmed its fuel location.

We've previously discussed Reactor #2 at Fukushima in some depth, and then let's accept a wait at where the ii reactors diverged. Both were boiling water reactors, and both were subject to the same blazon of damage — an earthquake plus seismic sea wave that disrupted power to their cooling systems. At this point, the but thing that could've stopped the fuel in Reactors i-3 from melting down was to begin immediate seawater injection. But this would have destroyed the reactors, and the Japanese authorities didn't immediately desire to take that step.

To bring the temperature down at Reactor #3, and to prevent the possibility of further hydrogen gas explosions, the Japanese government hurled huge amounts of boric acrid-infused h2o at the problem. From the appointment of the accident through March 22, approximately 988,532 gallons of h2o were sprayed or injected into Reactor #iii alone. An Olympic swimming pool contains near 660,000 gallons of h2o, to give some idea of scale. Reactor #3 seems to have had temperature stabilization issues that weren't encountered as severely at the other reactors.

We pumped enormous quantities of water in Reactor #3 to bring its temperature downward.

This graph shows how high Reactor #3'southward Temperature readings were and how long it took to bring them down. The light orange line refers to temperature readings taken at the water feed, as compared to readings taken from under (the exact word is "lower" so I'thou uncertain if the usage is best read one mode or the other) the force per unit area vessel flange ). The line beneath the graph states: "False readings possible," and what I believe means "Handled sensors were damaged," Either fashion, take this data with a grain of salt.

Here'south the BBC:

Tokyo Electric Ability Visitor (Tepco) said that the images – revealed on Friday – were the offset 'high probable' sighting of melted fuel since the 2022 disaster. 'At that place is a high possibility that the solidified objects are mixtures of melted metallic and fuel that fell from the vessel,' a spokesman said…Some of the objects appeared like icicles hanging around a command rod mechanism, which is attached to the bottom of the reactor's pressure level vessel property the core, the company said.

Finding the missing fuel in Reactor #3 is critical to long-term clean-up efforts. Just the sheer difficulty of fixing the meltdown problem is part of why it's taken us six years simply to get to this signal. The radioactivity in that water is going to be difficult to deal with.

Now read: How does nuclear free energy work?