JCB ROBOT DRIVER?

I was thinking about the disaster in Japan with the Nuclear Power Plant. one of the problems they have is the rubble left from the explosions, I was thinking they could do with a robotic JCB or similar but then I thought that's OK untill they need a mini digger or a crane.
Then I got the idea. What if they made a robot driver that would be strapped into the standard machine seat, and the arms and legs were adjusted to control the pedals the movement for most controls is quite small, these were relayed in real time to the controller. The robot would not be humanoid in appearance but have as many limbs as necessary to operate the controls stereo camera mounted were the operators head would be and BINGO you have a robotic what ever you want.

What do you think?

I considered going over with my new venture of Aerial Videography (HD camera's mounted to large helicopter's) to do some surveilence of the nuclear reactors as there semed to be very little in the way of anything getting very close!
After abit of reading though, i found out that the radiation pretty much fries the electronics in anything we use. The full size helicopter's dropping water over the reactors apparently have large lead plates underneath to reduce the radiation efects with the aircrafts electronics.

Grant,

That rather reminds me of the old rumour that some of the old British rail steam shunters were purposely kept from scrapping because their replacements wouldn't work in the event of radiation leakage.

I suppose they'd be more in their element - no shortage of boiling water there!