FARK.com: (6055711) The first repair workers into the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactors may be Robots. It took Japan THIS long to tap their second greatest natural resource?

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		The first repair workers into the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactors may be Robots. It took Japan THIS long to tap their second greatest natural resource? (npr.org)		71
		More: Followup, Japan, nuclear accidents, nuclear reactors, plant operator, irobot, reactor building, Carnegie Mellon University, repairs

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1767 clicks; posted to Main » on 23 Mar 2011 at 10:57 AM | Favorite | share:

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FloydA		2011-03-23 11:57:10 AM

Many women now prefer robots to human males.

FloydA		2011-03-23 11:58:13 AM

Soon, they will come for our men.

FloydA		2011-03-23 12:00:43 PM

There is only one hope for our species' survival: Robot Suit.

signaljammer		2011-03-23 12:03:16 PM

Rad-hardening is its own science. I recall a satellite that had redundant memory as planes in a dodecahedron. The idea is that the particles that destabilized the memory traveled in straight lines. A single event would lose the vote. I think that they make chips with sapphire substrates to make them a little harder, but yeah, tronics doesn't fare well in really radioactive circumstances.

Sebastrd		2011-03-23 12:06:21 PM

hypocaffeinemia: zootsuit: Second greatest natural resource, after it became clear that tentacle porn wouldn't be able to solve the problem.

To be fair, if they don't solve this problem it will lead to creation of real-life tentacle porn.

It's real to me dammit!!

British		2011-03-23 12:21:14 PM

C'mon the iRobot? Japan has to have something 100000000x better than this for radioactive cleanup duty.

Edziak		2011-03-23 12:27:52 PM

That's because the Japanese and the Americans have completely different idealizations of where experimental robotics should reach.

In the U.S. you have people at MIT making ugly little robots like Kismet that are meant to show practical applications.

In Japan they just go for the whole anthropomorphic enchilada. Who cares if its useful, its a MARVELOUS MECHANICAL MAN!

I like the Japanese robots better, even if they are of little use. They are cute.

trappedspirit		2011-03-23 12:36:08 PM

Yeah, bomb defusing robots with water hoses. I called that about a week ago.

New band name, "Tokyo Tapwater"

royone		2011-03-23 12:45:08 PM

I think some of them have been tapping that resource for a while.
news.cnet.com

Honest Bender		2011-03-23 01:02:50 PM

To be fair, he IS armed with a 10,000 megaton self detonation device... Probably not what you want to send in to a damaged reactor.

/Then again, he can play the deadly hexi-kicks...
//And dildo fusion tooooooo.

Sherjo311		2011-03-23 01:09:29 PM

is this where we speculate on what japan's number 1 greatest natural resource is?

dk47		2011-03-23 01:36:16 PM

I thought first was schoolgirls.

oldtaku		2011-03-23 02:01:50 PM

Tentacles? It's lolis. Tentacles aren't really a 'resource' any more than coyotes are. You just have to watch out for your small mammals.

Easy solution - run a few ads claiming chunks of semi-melted fuel rod are busukawaii (paint some big sad eyes on them) and in a couple days they'll all be turned into cellphone chains and distributed throughout the... uh... well, maybe that's why they're using the robots instead.

Ball of Confusion		2011-03-23 03:19:26 PM

Sherjo311: is this where we speculate on what japan's number 1 greatest natural resource is?

lava rock.

dittybopper		2011-03-23 03:31:49 PM

Exclusive first picture of the robot at Fukushima Daiichi

just_dis_guy		2011-03-23 08:00:10 PM

I used to work with some guys that worked on the robot that went into TMI, so... well, I'm not really surprised. That was a long time ago. There's some things that are just better done remotely.

gaslight		2011-03-23 08:11:39 PM

If it was Germany, there'd be robots. The only thing that the Japanese probably had on had were sex robots.

Fissile		2011-03-23 08:16:23 PM

Robots sent into the crippled nuke plants would need to be shielded against radiation. I doubt that the Japanese have very many robots of that type.

During the Chernobyl disaster, the Russians used robots that were developed for their space program. The Russian robots were shielded against radiation, and even those robots had their electronics fried in short order by the high levels of radiation near the blown reactor.

limboslam		2011-03-24 01:40:57 AM

FTFA: ".....so dangerous is certainly what we're talking about here," says Tim Trainer, a vice president at iRobot, an American firm that has sent four of its robots to the company that owns the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant."

Did anybody else catch this? Japan, who because of the ASIMO (a fairly complex programable humanoid that can look cute and walk around on a flat surface) had the world convinced they're the leaders in robotic technology are actually nothing of the sort.