It could take a century
Maybe we should chip in and buy a second robot.
It may take a century not because of robot costs, but because the materials haven’t decayed enough to store in a dry cask.
Maybe we should chip in and buy a second robot.
Hear me out: three robots.
This is what we need AI for. Robots that can independantly handle this type of task that is too dangerous for humans.
Fuck the generative garbage we have now. Work on this stuff instead.
But where’s the money in that?
“Our shareholders insist the line must go up!”
GenAI is getting better and better
Generative AI, as it is being built right now, is a dead-end. It won’t get much better than it currently is (markedly worse once the next-gen is forced to scrape data that includes AI generated data) and hallucinations are always going to be the reality for them.
It’s why there’s this big push over the last couple of years to get these products to market. Not because you’re going to corner some burgeoning industry (though the hype definitely is designed to look like that), but because this is a grift now and you have to get the goods while there’s still goods to get. Need to recoup those R&D dollars somehow.
That’s what they’ve said about every disruptive technology since the beginning of time.
I’m against it being shoved down our throats at every opportunity for a quick buck, but it’s very much an active area of research.
You’d be foolish to think there’s no innovation or imlrovements to be made.
Wall-E, is that you?
Why don’t they use humans like the Soviets? Are they stupid?
The Soviets never sent humans into the reactor to remove melted core material. The remains of the Chernobyl No. 4 core are still there inside the sarcophagus, and I don’t think anyone was making serious plans to remove them even before the Ukraine war got in the way.
(The job that got so many Soviet workers exposed was moving solid radioactive debris from the exploded core so that the initial containment sarcophagus could be built and the other three reactors on the site restarted. Nothing comparable was required at Fukushima because the explosions there didn’t breach any of the cores, thus no chunks of highly radioactive graphite to shovel off the roofs. I understand that the Soviets did try robots, but radiation isn’t good for electronics and, well, it was Soviet equipment in 1986—they just weren’t very effective.)
They actually tried using a West German state of the art police robot but it failed. IIRC it still sits broken on the roof to this day.