Climate

Japanese authorities decry ongoing robot failures at Fukushima

Comment

Image Credits: Greg Webb for IAEA (opens in a new window) under a CC BY-SA 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

Six years ago, a massive earthquake, consequent tsunami and nuclear crisis struck Japan. International organizations rushed to help the country’s devastated residents, and to figure out how to clean up Fukushima Daiichi, the wrecked nuclear power plant. Robots offered a ray of hope amid unfathomable loss. At least they did, until recently.

As the Asahi Shimbun reported yesterday, members of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority are now urging plant operators Tokyo Electric Power Company to find new technology and methods to aid in the cleanup. Robots keep getting fried on their missions, literally from radiation damage, or stranded on-site wasting precious money and time.

The implication is that, perhaps, the clean up will move faster if Tepco’s energy and the government’s money is redirected to chemistry, biology, and so-called “safe containment,” building some sort of structure around Fukushima Daiichi like the “sarcophagus” around Chernobyl. Or perhaps humans need to trust AI to move robots through some of their tasks. All of the robots deployed in the cleanup effort have been remote-operated by humans, so far. The government watchdog’s critical comments followed the latest robo-fail revealed by Tepco.

The PMORPH survey robot is being used to clean up Fukushima.

On March 23 the company said it had attempted to send a survey robot into a containment vessel to find fuel debris, information it needs to decommission the plant. But the PMORPH survey robot, developed by Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy and the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning (IRID), couldn’t get its cameras to the predetermined location. As a result, it only sent back a partial report.

Just one month earlier, Tepco aborted a mission using a Toshiba “scorpion” robot that was built to scramble over rubble, capture images and data inside the plant’s facilities. The robot could tolerate up to 1,000 sieverts of radiation. And yet, it had trouble within the hostile environs of the number 2 reactor where it was dispatched.

These followed a string of earlier robot losses at the plant going back to the Quince 1, the first robot to enter the facility after the disaster. Developed by the Chiba Institute of Technology, the International Rescue System Institute, and Tohoku University in Japan, Quince went into the power plant’s reactor 2 building where it measured radiation levels, collected dust samples and video footage. It ran several missions but eventually disconnected from its communications cable and got stranded within the building.

This “scorpion robot” was built to investigate inside containment vessels at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

It’s not like anyone thought it would be easy to make robots capable of finding and retrieving molten nuclear fuel, or decommissioning and decontaminating a nuclear power plant. Japanese researchers have been trying to create robots with these capabilities since the 80s, as Timothy Hornyak wrote in the journal Science last year. Robots remain incredibly tantalizing technology.

With cameras, dosimeters, and other tools on board, robots can ostensibly go where conditions would prove fatal to humans. If they were strong and agile enough, they might be able to bring core samples up for scientists to test, or find and plug leaks, clear paths and scour away radioactive materials. The ultimate task would be for robots to identify and retrieve some 600 tons of molten nuclear fuel and debris from Fukushima.

Despite the nuclear watchdog’s most recent admonition, many robots, even the fried ones, have been helpful in what little progress has been made in cleaning up the site.

iRobot’s PackBot 510 E.T.

Early on, iRobot’s ground-based PackBot and Warrior robots, and Honeywell’s T-Hawk drones helped TEPCO get a handle on radioactivity and conditions around its facilities, including around damaged reactors within weeks of the disaster. Swimming and crawling robots, also developed by Hitachi and GE Nuclear energy, were used in a 2014 mission to capture images and readings from within a damaged reactor.

Still, with every failed or aborted mission, every $1 million spent, it gets harder to tell people devastated by a crisis that robots are their greatest hope. Japan’s 3/11 crisis killed tens of thousands, left thousands missing and displaced a quarter of a million people. As radiation first gushed from the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant, millions of residents were left mourning without electricity or water through cold and wet, end-of-winter weather.

More than half of those who fled or were evacuated from the area have no plans to come back, even still, according to Japanese government surveys. Scientific studies have concluded that certain areas are safe for residents’ return. But there’s not much in the way of schools, stores or other critical community support around Fukushima, and fears linger.  The Japanese government estimates the cleanup effort will cost $189 billion and will take decades.

Let’s hope the next “step change” in technology, whether in robotics or another promising area, will hasten the Fukushima recovery, and prevent nuclear disasters from ever happening again.

More TechCrunch

Featured Article

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker on the Telegram security clash and the “edge lords” at OpenAI 

Meredith Whittaker has had it with the “frat house” contingent of the tech industry. I sat down with the CEO of Signal at VivaTech in Paris to go over the wide range of serious, grown-up issues society is facing, from disinformation, to who controls AI, to the encroaching surveillance state. In the course of our…

13 mins ago
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker on the Telegram security clash and the “edge lords” at OpenAI 

Lucid Motors is laying off about 400 employees, or roughly 6% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring ahead of the launch of its first electric SUV later this…

Lucid Motors slashes 400 jobs ahead of crucial SUV launch

Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup. As part of the deal, the Android-maker will also provide…

Google invests $350 million in India’s Flipkart

A Jio Financial unit plans to purchase customer premises equipment and telecom gear worth $4.32 billion from Reliance Retail.

Jio Financial unit to buy $4.32B of telecom gear from Reliance Retail

Foursquare, the location-focused outfit that in 2020 merged with Factual, another location-focused outfit, is joining the parade of companies to make cuts to one of its biggest cost centers –…

Foursquare just laid off 105 employees

“Running with scissors is a cardio exercise that can increase your heart rate and require concentration and focus,” says Google’s new AI search feature. “Some say it can also improve…

Using memes, social media users have become red teams for half-baked AI features

The European Space Agency selected two companies on Wednesday to advance designs of a cargo spacecraft that could establish the continent’s first sovereign access to space.  The two awardees, major…

ESA prepares for the post-ISS era, selects The Exploration Company, Thales Alenia to develop cargo spacecraft

Expressable is a platform that offers one-on-one virtual sessions with speech language pathologists.

Expressable brings speech therapy into the home

The French Secretary of State for the Digital Economy as of this year, Marina Ferrari, revealed this year’s laureates during VivaTech week in Paris. According to its promoters, this fifth…

The biggest French startups in 2024 according to the French government

Spotify is notifying customers who purchased its Car Thing product that the devices will stop working after December 9, 2024. The company discontinued the device back in July 2022, but…

Spotify to shut off Car Thing for good, leading users to demand refunds

Elon Musk’s X is preparing to make “likes” private on the social network, in a change that could potentially confuse users over the difference between something they’ve favorited and something…

X should bring back stars, not hide ‘likes’

The FCC has proposed a $6 million fine for the scammer who used voice-cloning tech to impersonate President Biden in a series of illegal robocalls during a New Hampshire primary…

$6M fine for robocaller who used AI to clone Biden’s voice

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Is it…

Tesla lobbies for Elon and Kia taps into the GenAI hype

Crowdaa is an app that allows non-developers to easily create and release apps on the mobile store. 

App developer Crowdaa raises €1.2M and plans a US expansion

Back in 2019, Canva, the wildly successful design tool, introduced what the company was calling an enterprise product, but in reality it was more geared toward teams than fulfilling true…

Canva launches a proper enterprise product — and they mean it this time

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 isn’t just an event for innovation; it’s a platform where your voice matters. With the Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice Program, you have the power to shape the…

2 days left to vote for Disrupt Audience Choice

The United States Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, for alleged monopolistic practices. Live Nation and…

Ticketmaster antitrust lawsuit could give new hope to ticketing startups

The U.K. will shortly get its own rulebook for Big Tech, after peers in the House of Lords agreed Thursday afternoon to pass the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer bill…

‘Pro-competition’ rules for Big Tech make it through UK’s pre-election wash-up

Spotify’s addition of its AI DJ feature, which introduces personalized song selections to users, was the company’s first step into an AI future. Now, Spotify is developing an alternative version…

Spotify experiments with an AI DJ that speaks Spanish

Call Arc can help answer immediate and small questions, according to the company. 

Arc Search’s new Call Arc feature lets you ask questions by ‘making a phone call’

After multiple delays, Apple and the Paris area transportation authority rolled out support for Paris transit passes in Apple Wallet. It means that people can now use their iPhone or…

Paris transit passes now available in iPhone’s Wallet app

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, will be recycling production scrap for batteries going into General Motors electric vehicles.  The company announced Thursday…

Redwood Materials is partnering with Ultium Cells to recycle GM’s EV battery scrap

A new startup called Auggie is aiming to give parents a single platform where they can shop for products and connect with each other. The company’s new app, which launched…

Auggie’s new app helps parents find community and shop

Andrej Safundzic, Alan Flores Lopez and Leo Mehr met in a class at Stanford focusing on ethics, public policy and technological change. Safundzic — speaking to TechCrunch — says that…

Lumos helps companies manage their employees’ identities — and access

Remark trains AI models on human product experts to create personas that can answer questions with the same style of their human counterparts.

Remark puts thousands of human product experts into AI form

ZeroPoint claims to have solved compression problems with hyper-fast, low-level memory compression that requires no real changes to the rest of the computing system.

ZeroPoint’s nanosecond-scale memory compression could tame power-hungry AI infrastructure

In 2021, Roi Ravhon, Asaf Liveanu and Yizhar Gilboa came together to found Finout, an enterprise-focused toolset to help manage and optimize cloud costs. (We covered the company’s launch out…

Finout lands cash to grow its cloud spend management platform

On the heels of raising $102 million earlier this year, Bugcrowd is making good on its promise to use some of that funding to make acquisitions to strengthen its security…

Bugcrowd, the crowdsourced white-hat hacker platform, acquires Informer to ramp up its security chops

Google is preparing to build what will be the first subsea fiber-optic cable connecting the continents of Africa and Australia. The news comes as the major cloud hyperscalers battle it…

Google to build first subsea fiber-optic cable connecting Africa with Australia

The Kia EV3 — the new all-electric compact SUV revealed Thursday — illustrates a growing appetite among global automakers to bring generative AI into their vehicles.  The automaker said the…

The new Kia EV3 will have an AI assistant with ChatGPT DNA