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Comment by mhb | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't they using these in Fukushima:

http://metamodern.com/2011/03/24/fukushima-%E2%80%94-where-a...

Actually I was surprised they didn't ship in a bunch of electric generators (since Japan is the home of Honda and Yamaha, two of the very best in portable generation) to power the water pumps.

Or one of those remote-control firefighting robots to drag a firehose into the fuel rod pool area to keep things covered in water.

I have to assume the people in charge thought of those things and decided against for some logistical reason.

I thought they should rig automated catapults to lob ice at the spent fuel pools. If solid ice could damage the fuel casings, crush it and repack it. Even if the missiles miss the pool, they would help by cooling the ambient air and slow evaporation from the pool.

Uh... that's your first thought, really? You honestly think, out of the combined force of Japan, the US, the US military, and plenty of brilliant engineers across the globe, that that HASN'T crossed their mind?

Try radiation hardening electronics + battery life + hardening optics/sensors + control range + reliability/safety + size of areas involved = a 1,200lb flying robot that probably won't work, or only work for a few minutes, nevermind will probably crash and break open the pressure casing.

...

Godamnit...

[EDITED:] Your condescending tone is unhelpful.

It's not my first thought - it's Drexler's who's a lot smarter than me. Maybe you should read the comments over there.

Although this RC plane can't hover, it seems to have potentially useful range and flight time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUPL16L7pjA

EM interference from the radiation.

Yes. They tried to send in robots to observe and help the liquidators move debris at Chernobyl, but they didn't last very long. It isn't so much the radio signal as the electronics get damaged very easily by radiation.

I don't think the radiation has had any effect on radio communications, has it? That just seems really unlikely.

It doesn't effect radio communications. It does very nasty things to electronics though. Mostly because it can provide energy directly to the inside of, say, a transistor or the inside of a dram cell causing things to malfunction. It can also do interesting things to the silicon lattice itself, which is what typically causes complete failure of electronic devices in a high radiation environment.

Even a leaky reactor won't do much to the RF signal, but it can affect basically every other aspect of the electronics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening

Ever wondered why data cables are shielded?

As far as I can recall, most data cables arn't shielded. Audio cables usually are, however, to stop hum/etc. when travelling over long distances.

To be more specific, if you have wire it will act like an antenna. It's usually a fairly poor antenna for most types of EM that you would find, however there are some things, ie. 50hz hum from mains power and its harmonics, that are powerful enough to induce a nontrivial amount of interference for analog applications.

Most digital signals either don't care (because the interference is too weak), or don't care (because they are using twisted pairs and the signal cancels out overall) and hence they are usually unsheilded.

Nuclear radiation can't, in normal circumstance, induce a signal into a wire.

Because they have no sensors, no sense of height, speed, or their position in space The room they are in determines their position in space and guides them through it.

Ghost in the Shell - Japanese miracle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell#Jap...)

I do like the tethered balloon idea in the comments. Or kite even.

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