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British drone set to help nuclear accident sites
Not all drones are bad. It depends on what you do with them.A drone built to improve monitoring of nuclear disaster sites such as Fukushima has won funding to help its creator commercialise the device.
The quadcopter’s developer, Bristol University’s Dr James MacFarlane, claims it can provide a much more accurate picture of radiation at a nuclear site than current ground-based or helicopter-mounted equipment and even determine its precise chemical source.
MacFarlane plans to use the £15,000 award from the Royal Academy of Engineering and ERA Foundation to prove the reliability of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) by testing it at the site of the devastated Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, but hopes it could also be useful for day-to-day monitoring of operational plants as a complement to – rather than a replacement for – static points.
‘Because you can only have a limited number of static monitoring points around a site, the flexibility of being mobile gives an advantage to the operator,’ MacFarlane told The Engineer.
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/aerospace/news/british-drone-set-to-help-nuclear-accident-sites/1018254.article