After TMI accident in ’79, this Carnegie Mellon team pitched a novel idea for cleanup: Use robots. It was just the beginning.
The partial meltdown of one of Three Mile Island’s nuclear reactors 40 years ago left areas of the facility highly radioactive and inaccessible to humans.
Along came a group of young researchers with an idea to send in robots to fix the damage.
Red Whittaker led the team at Carnegie Mellon University, where from time to time he still works on robots for the nuclear industry.
“This is really old,” he said as he pulled up a Powerpoint on his office computer. “I haven’t looked at any of it in eternity.”
The presentation contains video footage his robot took of the basement at Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 containment building.
“They could see for the first time the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of gallons of contaminated water that had filled up like a bathtub to a height of about 8 feet,” Whittaker said.
The nation’s worst commercial nuclear accident prompted tens of thousands of people near the Dauphin County reactor to evacuate in March 1979.
In the years following, Mike Pavelek helped oversee the cleanup, which had been tasked to the engineering company Bechtel.
“We were not going to be able to put human beings in there because of the risk to exposure of radiation, which in some areas, would be lethal within an hour or less,” he recalled. “We decided we needed robots to do some of that work.”
Robots had never before been used in that way.
Workhorse, the third robot developed at Carnegie Mellon University to clean up the basement of Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 containment building after the 1979 accident, sits on display today at the school’s National Robotics Engineering Center. Although officials involved with the cleanup effort decided not to use the robot, it served as the basis for future robots developed by the researchers. – Amy Sisk / StateImpact Pennsylvania