The robot that could help clean up Fukushima

From Fukushima in Japan to Sellafield in the UK, the world is home to a number of sites that are contaminated with radioactive waste and require clean-up. The current techniques available to do this are expensive and time consuming – but a new'super hero' robot could help to cut both costs and time. The robot, called Avexis, is designed to fit through a 100mm access port in the flooded reactors at the Fukushima site, to locate and analyse melted fuel. Many areas around Fukushima are still being decontaminated, 58,000 people are still displaced from their homes and the local food industries have been crippled. Its designers hope that the robot will be ready to deploy at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power plant by February 2018.