Yeah I think there's definitely room for a limited amount of optimism - I hear people claim this is overblown, they keep citing the ~4000 death toll from Chernobyl as evidence, not just because the increase in cancer occurrences across the entire zone of fallout is likely to be at least 20 times that, but because the WHO study was particularly conservative, and only looked at a small region - the UCS (union of concerned scientists) has an interesting post on their allthingsnuclear blog that highlights this discrepancy - bottom line is that there will, absolutely be a death toll associated with Fukushima - it will at the absolute very least have long term effects on the food chain, (ingestion being the most harmful type of exposure to radiation) and the economy for a long time to come.

I agree with this.

You know the funny thing about this is that there very definitely is a need for this sort of machinery - I know I said this before but if you look at how crucial the ROV's were in the BP crisis I think there's something to be said for the same being available on land - a bulldozer type machine could easily be adapted from an MBT - and of course the cheapest to buy with working NBC protection would certainly be Russian models. Fit a dozer blade and an elevated camera pole to give good all round vision and you have a lot of the site cleanup taken care of.

The articulated arm would have to be a beam boom and claw articulated arm that can lift 500 kilograms. There has to be a camera at the grasper end of that arm The idea is that some kind of standard grasper might be better than detachable tools.

That said I think the most difficult point is going to come when cranes etc are needed on site to lift and contain the high level waste (fuel rods) - a human won't be able to get near them, and the amount of movement and disturbance required is going to result in a lot of airborne particles, what I really think there is a need for is a land-based or crane suspended  ROV, with arms capable of lifting a few hundred KG - dextrous enough to move the delicate fuel rods into storage vessels without dropping or damaging them in the process - they could perform a lot of the clean up inside the ruined reactor buildings, and reduce the need for human monitoring.  Whilst I can see them entombing the reactors themselves in concrete to deal with another day I can't work out how they plan to deal with the spent fuel pools - a crane will be needed certainly to cut away the girders and debris in the way but I have a feeling that at some point a human being is going to be asked to go on a suicide mission to do some of that necessary close-up work.

List of tools.

a. a grasper

b. a cutter

c. a scoop.

d. a drill

e. a .jaw spreader

There's been talk of robots being used for all sorts of useful missions, fire, rescue etc, what we see is that the level of development has essentially stalled (with the exception of underwater

The comparison of frontal vulnerable zones (from left to the right: M1A2SEP / LEOPARD 2A7(A6?) / T-90S / T-90AM):

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