Civilian Application At Disaster Site
On Friday, April 15, 2011, a T-hawk drone was used to conduct surveillance of the damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station. This nuclear plant suffered severe damage as a result of a devastating earthquake and tsunami which struck the east coast of Japan one month earlier. The damage resulted in several of the reactors at the facility undergoing partial meltdown, releasing radioactivity into the local area. The radiation was thousands of times above the safe limit for exposure, making the area unsafe for human habitation. The radiation was intense enough to make even short-term exposure hazardous, preventing people from going in to assess the damage. The T-hawk drone took numerous photographs of the damaged reactor housings, turbine buildings, spent nuclear fuel rod containment pools, and associated facilities damaged by the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent hydrogen gas explosions at the facility. This allowed Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) to better determine where the releases of radioactivity were coming from and how to best deal with them.
On Friday, June 24, 2011, a T-Hawk apparently crash-landed on the roof of the number 2 reactor building at Fukushima.
Read more about this topic: Honeywell RQ-16 T-Hawk
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“I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)