Kurion Inc. in California said it’s developing a robotic arm to go where humans can’t and repair water leaks in the Japan nuclear power plant crippled by an earthquake and tsunami almost four years ago. The technology will be used at the No. 2 reactor at the Fukushima plant starting in mid-2016 under a contract with Japan’s IHI Corp., according to the Irvine-based company. That follows work by Kurion to use a robot at the site to search for leaks. Three reactors melted down in 2011 at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s plant in what was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The utility has since used hundreds of thousands of tons of water to cool the reactors, much of which has leaked into basements at the site and is highly radioactive. This has meant a separate operation to pump out the toxic water for storage at the site in an ever-growing collection of storage tanks. Plugging the radioactive water leaks would reduce the amount of water needed to cool the melted reactors and allow workers to enter areas to proceed with the cleanup at the site, Kurion said. “Because it is a highly radioactive and extremely hazardous environment, the systems we are developing have to be 100 percent robotic,” Marc Rood, the project manager at Kurion, said today in a phone interview from Denver. The repair work by the robot would take about a year, he said. Technology developed for the clean-up operation at the nuclear plant will help in efforts to decommission facilities globally, Rood said. “The disaster has created this technology and innovation that we can then carry forward worldwide, whereas that would have been a much, much slower process otherwise,” he said. The utility known as Tepco last year signed a contract with Kurion to remove the isotope strontium from about 400,000 metric tons of radioactive water stored at Fukushima using truck-mounted filters. Kurion was awarded a second contract for a mobile processing system to treat tank water, it said in December.