Fukushima News: Deadly Nuclear Radiation Levels Cause Robot Failures To Mount At Power Plant

Even six years after a nuclear crisis struck Fukushima in Japan, radiation levels at Fukushima continued to reach the extreme levels. While most of this data is collected through cameras and robots, there is now a shadow of doubt about the future of these robots. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, failed to get a comprehensive report in its attempt to find nuclear debris in a containment vessel with the help of the PMORPH survey robot – developed by Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy and the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning (IRID) – on Thursday. This was the latest in the spate of robot failures in the process of decommissioning the plant. Last month, a Toshiba "scorpion" robot, built to tolerate up to 1,000 sieverts of radiation, was unable to withstand the high levels of nuclear toxicity in nuclear reactor No. 2. There have been a number of other instances, causing authorities to think of alternative approaches to the clean-up.