Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
4/25/2014
Kurion’s robotic remote systems division will ship an inspection system to Japan next week that will help in the inspection of Reactor 2 at the Fukushima-Daiichi cleanup site to identify any leaks within the primary containment vessel. The system will be delivered to the IHI Corporation, a Japanese company involved in the cleanup effort. “In terms of design, build, and test, we performed our work in 15 months, and the equipment will actually ship this coming Monday, the 28th,” Marc Rood , director of Business Development for Kurion’s Remote Systems & Services Group, told RW Monitor this week. “It should get to Japan in the first week of May. Our client, IHI, will set the equipment up in their testing facility and train their operators for approximately a month. After the operators have been trained and the equipment has been verified and tested in Japan, they will then move it over to the Unit 2 reactor to be deployed and doing inspections sometime this summer.”
The difficult circumstances at the reactor resulted in a custom system, made specifically for Fukushima, using technology leveraged from previous projects, Rood said. “Our system needs to be designed around the facility first and foremost, so the constrains of the facility in terms of going through existing plant room doors, hallways, head-height is a major issue, that we have to conform to with our piece of equipment in order to fit the building requirements is first and foremost,” Rood said. “The aspects for this piece of equipment are that the system must be deployed through a penetration in the floor up to 12 inches that can now be deployed 15 feet down vertically and another 15 feet horizontally to do the various inspections that are necessary.” Rood added, “All the while, it needs to deploy in an existing plant room with 10-12 feet ceilings that limit the size of the system and the package that actually goes into the plant room so that has been the biggest challenges in term of design.”
To achieve the vertical and horizontal requirements, the system has an arm that can extend the needed distances. The arm also includes several attachments that are used to clear and debris or steel members that may be in the way. “The arm is equipped with a couple different cutting tools,” Rood said. “The first of which is a gripper with a water-jet system that extends off of it. The water jet system is a high pressure water jet that is combined with sand that creates an abrasive texture that cuts through different types of debris that it may encountered when it is deployed in the floor. The first phase of the operation will be to identify an debris that needs to be size-reduced or removed using a water-jet tool or the second cutting tool, which is a shear that will go in and cut different steel members that are in the way as well. Those two tools are essentially there to clear the debris field before the inspection can commence.”
Future Remote Systems Contract with IHI
Kurion has other contracts with IHI to deliver similar technologies in the coming years to help address some of the cleanup problems at Fukushima right now. Currently, Kurion is under contract to develop technology to address the leaks that are found during this initial phase, and the company expects a contract for final design and manufacturing of that design by the end of this year, Rood said. The third and final phase, the removal of fuel from the reactors, a complicated step that has prompted a Request for Information from the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning asking for innovative approaches to removing the fuel, is also on Kurion’s mind. According to Rood, Kurion has a contract with IHI to conduct a feasibility study on potential technology and design that could be applied for the fuel removal.
Kurion’s relationship with IHI may prove to be fruitful in the future. Although IHI is still only a small player in the Fukushima cleanup market, it is steadily gaining a larger influence at the site. “IHI is really a tier-two player over in Japan, but because of their D&D experience and their robotic and remote systems experience, they are actually positioned to become a potential tier-1 player in the future at Fukushima—in the same line of Toshiba, Mitsubishi, and GE Hitachi,” Rood said.
