A few points: those Mars rovers (speaking of Spirit and Opportunity here -- the new rover I'm less read up on) are NOT made for the kind of intense radiation they would encounter inside the reactor pressure vessel. Even the kind of cosmic-ray exposure they get on Mars, which lacks a decent atmospheric shield, is far less. The radiation is also quite different -- inside the reactor you're going to run into more neutrons and alpha and beta particles.
These rovers also are completely inadaquate to the terrain. They are very, very slow, had to have their routes plotted out in great painstaking detail, and generally made a few meters/day, unless my memory is really failing me. And those tiny wheels can't handle much at all in the way of obstacles.
Also, calling those rovers "autonomous" is... quite an exaggeration. Imagine a RC toy robot that has just enough smarts to keep you from driving over the edge of a cliff that you can't see through the onboard cameras.
And one last thing: getting one of those rovers, or some other robot, into the primary containment would involve opening the pressure vessel, wouldn't it? And leaving it open to let the tether pass through, since we've already discussed the unlikelyhood of wireless operation. That's not an action I would want to take without a much more pressing, specific need -- just to eyeball the vessel from within probably doesn't warrant it, unless the external monitoring methodologies show something that they would really benefit from getting eyeballs on inside the hot zone.
And, frankly, even if they got a rover of some sort into the core and found a crack or something in the containment, what good would it do? It's not like they can send in a welding crew to fix it. Either the graphite melt-capture bed below the primary containment captures the melting-down core (if that happens), or it doesn't. If it fails... well, I'm not sure there's anything humanly possible to do about it at this point.
These rovers also are completely inadaquate to the terrain. They are very, very slow, had to have their routes plotted out in great painstaking detail, and generally made a few meters/day, unless my memory is really failing me. And those tiny wheels can't handle much at all in the way of obstacles.
Also, calling those rovers "autonomous" is... quite an exaggeration. Imagine a RC toy robot that has just enough smarts to keep you from driving over the edge of a cliff that you can't see through the onboard cameras.
And one last thing: getting one of those rovers, or some other robot, into the primary containment would involve opening the pressure vessel, wouldn't it? And leaving it open to let the tether pass through, since we've already discussed the unlikelyhood of wireless operation. That's not an action I would want to take without a much more pressing, specific need -- just to eyeball the vessel from within probably doesn't warrant it, unless the external monitoring methodologies show something that they would really benefit from getting eyeballs on inside the hot zone.
And, frankly, even if they got a rover of some sort into the core and found a crack or something in the containment, what good would it do? It's not like they can send in a welding crew to fix it. Either the graphite melt-capture bed below the primary containment captures the melting-down core (if that happens), or it doesn't. If it fails... well, I'm not sure there's anything humanly possible to do about it at this point.