Radioactive Robot: The Machines That Cleaned Up Three Mile Island
Robots cleaned up what humans could not because of radioactive contamination after the worst nuclear accident in the nation's history 30 years ago
Radioactive Robot: The Machines That Cleaned Up Three Mile Island
- REDBOT: The CoreSampler was the second of three robots built by a team of students led by "Red" Whittaker to help with the TMI sweep up; it carried a column of drills that allowed engineers to take samples from the walls of the reactor's basement to test for radioactive contamination. Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University
- RAD ROVER: In a photo from the 1980s Whittaker sits in a control room with the Rover, or Remote Reconnaissance Vehicle, a robot he built with students that carried lights and cameras and provided engineers with the first video images of Three Mile Island's contaminated basement after the nation's worst nuke accident there on March 28, 1979. Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University
- ROBOT RELIEF: William "Red" Whittaker, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, stands outside the university's National Robotics Engineering Center in Pittsburgh. Whittaker assembled a team of students in the 1980s to build three robots designed to help clean up the basement of a damaged reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The partial meltdown, which occurred 30 years ago on March 28, 1979, soured U.S. public opinion on the use of nuclear power. © Scientific American / Daniel Lovering
