Fukushima Robot Operator Tells His Story

An anonymous reader writes "An anonymous robot operator at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant has kept a blog describing in candid detail his day-to-day life at the crippled facility, including robot training exercises and actual radiation-survey and clean-up missions. The blog was recently deleted, but some copies existed around the web and IEEE Spectrum has translated and published portions of it in English. The blog shows that although the operators use remote-controlled robots, they have to work in areas of high radiation, using protective gear and shielded trucks. They also rely on a great deal of improvisation, and there have been a few incidents that put the robot missions at risk."

Comments

"A sense of humor"

[Anonymous Coward]

Depressing as it was to hear that the blog was removed, I confess that I loved the ending.

After paging through several stories of how exciting it is to learn new skills - even while opposed by dysfunctional management, impossible deadlines, the occasional mistake, and co-workers who insist on running over network cabling, the blog ends with:

You know we have a sense of humor right?

Yes, we do. Some things in the technology business - and in humor - are universal.

Thank you, Anonymous Robot Operator-san, for the work you and your team are doing, and for your diligence and honesty in documenting it.

Re:Tepco, Japan and the robots

[lloydchristmas759]

Actually, most integrated circuits don't work well when exposed to radiations. They provoke single-event upsets, which can, for instance, turn a 0 into a 1 in a register or a SRAM. ECC or parity check can help mitigating the risk, but they will not suffice. That's why the semiconductor industry proposes "space-grade" components which are radiation hardened. Unfortunately, these components are about 10x more expensive than their commercial-grade versions and only a tiny fraction of what's available in commercial grade is also available in space grade.

Re:Tepco, Japan and the robots

[subreality]

They could have gotten by with consumer-grade parts. There's no substitute for rad-hardened parts on satellites because launching another is very expensive, but that wasn't the case here.

In Fukushima, they could have done what hundreds of hobbyists do: Run down to Radio Shack, get a cheap toy helicopter, strap a camera to it. This is all analog tech, so there's no OS to crash if the circuits pick up some noise, as long as it's not so much nose that the thing fries entirely - and even that would give you a pretty useful bit of information.

Possible failure scenarios:

• * Helicopter fails when it gets close and drops to the ground. Solution: Get another helicopter.
• * Helicopter goes haywire and crashes headfirst into the spent fuel pool. Solution: This building is already blown right the fuck up; the mechanical damage is utterly irrelevant, and worst case, the li-poly batteries might slightly contaminate the water. Deal with that later. Get another helicopter.

Cost: Less than $1000 a pop for a really nice toy chopper and a very decent video camera.
Risks: Essentially none, as above.
Rewards: Nice up-close pictures instead of fast manned fly-bys hundreds of meters away.

Even if that plan gets vetoed, there are commercially available rad-hardened UAVs and ground recon bots. All they had to do was google it, call someone up, and get a handful flown out there. I'm sure they could get a few bots for $1M, or even for free given the publicity. That's essentially what the eventually did - why did they wait?