Fukushima Robot Operator Tells His Story 57
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."
"A sense of humor" (Score:3, Insightful)
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:
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tepco, Japan and the robots (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
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?