Inventor’s ‘Iron Man’ suit takes off Chernobyl wasteland will become a giant solar farm
Richard Browning, a British inventor dubbed ‘‘Wiltshire’s Iron Man’’, has successfully demonstrated his personal flight suit on the shores of Vancouver harbour, with mini-jet engines on his hands.
Inspired by the Marvel comic superhero Iron Man, Browning flew in a circle and hovered a short distance from the ground using thrusters attached to his arms and back, captivating attendees at the Vancouver TED conference.
‘‘The hypothesis was that the human mind and body, if properly augmented, could achieve some pretty cool stuff,’’ said Browning, an extreme athlete and engineer, at the gathering, where he was representing his flight suit startup company, Gravity.
The personal flight suit, called Daedalus, was capable of propelling wearers much higher and faster than during the demonstration, he said.
Browning said he had experimented with various numbers and arrays of the engines on his limbs. The current suit is capable of flying for around 10 minutes.
‘‘The whole journey was about trying and failing, and learning from that,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t think anyone is going to be going down to Wal-mart with it or taking anybody to school for quite a while, but the team at Gravity is moving it along.’’
A video of Browning’s first reasonably stable, six-second flight in Daedalus has logged more than a million views since being posted on YouTube in March. The company has posted various videos showing flights and adjustments to the gear throughout the testing process.
A flight suit that could carry the wearer into a hovering helicopter for further journeys was some way away, said Browning.
He said the firm has already received interest from investors, including some in the British military, who told him they had given up on the flight feature of an Iron Man-style suit until seeing his gear. A commercial version of the suit is expected to cost US$150,000 (NZ$218,000). Ukraine has begun transforming the radioactive wasteland around the Chernobyl nuclear plant into a huge solar power farm.
The government wants to install enough panels inside the exclusion zone to produce 2.5 gigawatts of power – equivalent to about half the capacity of the plant before the fourth reactor exploded in 1986, spewing plumes of toxic fallout.
Ecology Minister Ostap Semerak said the plans were already being put into action. ‘‘Today we can talk about the first private investment in the zone – a small solar station that is being built,’’ he said.
A Ukrainian-German company has invested US$1.1 million (NZ$1.6m) in the station’s construction. It should start producing electricity by the end of June and have a capacity of 1.5 megawatts.
That is only a tiny part of the wider US$1.1 billion Chernobyl energy project, which includes a biogas facility and up to 5000 hectares of solar panels.
Semerak said the idea was to change the perception of Chernobyl from ‘‘a zone of disasters’’ to one of new development.
Fifty companies had expressed interest in investing, he said. ‘‘The potential is enormous.’’
The solar project is viable partly because infrastructure remains from 12 planned nuclear reactors envisaged during the Soviet era, including networks of power lines. Low land rents are also an incentive.
There are radiation hot spots in the zone but they have been extensively mapped and can be avoided during installation of the panels. Experts say care will have to be taken to minimise disturbing the soil.
Despite it being officially banned, hundreds of people returned to live in the exclusion zone after the accident, and many claim that they have suffered no ill effects.