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Comment by LaFolle | Hacker News Reader

A great use case for drones to fly in and take photographs.

A quick Google search shows it already has been done => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra7YbBvbRYQ

Had drones existed in 1986 and deployed to take close photographs of disaster, would it have been safe to access that drone after it returned?

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Well, maybe, except the fact that the SU tried to use Robots built in Western Germany, and the radioactivity just fried them. They were absolutely inusable under those conditions. Read about radiation shielding in space missions and the problems that microelectronics have there.

I see.

Quote from wikipedia: "Equipment assembled included remote-controlled bulldozers and robot-carts that could detect radioactivity and carry hot debris. Valery Legasov (first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow) said, in 1987: "But we learned that robots are not the great remedy for everything. Where there was very high radiation, the robot ceased to be a robot—the electronics quit working.""

Apparently they designed the robot against specs that were deliberately underestimated to prove that a meltdown couldn't cause the amount of radiation damage it did, and the Germans built the robot to spec and it instantly fried

Oh, didnt know that. Probably should read up on this, then. But yeah, it fits.

That was a bad link, those are just photos of the outside, where it was perfectly fine to visit if you avoided standing downwind. In fact, they apparently overflew it just two days later and took this footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoJTNC-3XLA

They've tried to put drones into Fukushima, attempts so far have been unproductive one way trips. Not all of that is the radiation killing stuff, apparently the geometry to be navigated has some pretty narrow passages as well.

Yeah, except when: "TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said that due to its small size and weight, the drone was “unlikely to crash through the rooftop and damage the reactor.”"

http://www.japanprobe.com/2011/06/25/t-hawk-uav-fails-at-fuk...

They used (or tried) a lot of remote controlled robots, but many of the break down due to the high radiation. There is a museum of them: http://io9.gizmodo.com/a-museum-of-robotic-equipment-used-du...

Thanks for the link.

You can see robots being used to clear off debris here: https://youtu.be/ezohqY-vg4s?t=57m43s

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