The Japanese government Friday eased evacuation orders for towns not seriously contaminated by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster. The government lifted evacuation orders for parts of Kawamata, Namie and Iitate, Kyodo News reported. The order also frees a large part of Tomioka on Saturday. The action reduces the evacuation zones by two-thirds but it was unclear whether residents actually would return to their homes because of radiation fears and a lack of amenities like schools. The most seriously contaminated areas remain off-limits.

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.

The company in charge of the ruined Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant revealed Thursday it needed new ideas to design robots capable of surviving the high levels of radiation inside the site's reactors, which were damaged in a 2011 earthquake and its resulting tsunami. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) has hit a new obstacle since being tasked with cleaning up the worst nuclear incident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union. The exploratory robot, specially designed to navigate the underwater sections of the reactor, died last month after being exposed to "unimaginable" levels of radiation nearly nine times more potent than the previous highest dose recorded. Naohiro Masuda, president of Tepco's Fukushima Daiichi Decommissioning project, told reporters that the company had to rethink its methods in order to examine and extract the hazardous material stuck in the plant's second reactor. "We should think out of the box so we can examine the bottom of the core and how melted fuel debris spread out," Masuda said, according to the Japan Times.

Radiation inside Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant reached such astronomical levels Thursday that not even a robot could survive inside. A remote controlled cleaning machine sent into the incapacitated plant had to be pulled out after it ceased to function due to high levels of radiation. It was the first time a robot had entered the No. 2 reactor since the plant's meltdown in 2011. Radiation reached "unimaginable" levels recently, experts told The Japan Times. The previous high was measured at 73 sieverts per hour, one year after the disaster.