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Thirteen years since a massive earthquake and tsunami struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in northern Japan, causing a loss of power, meltdowns and a major release of radioactive material, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) finally seems to be close to extracting the first bit of melted fuel from the complex—thanks to a special telescopic robotic device.

Despite Japan’s prowess in industrial robotics, TEPCO had no robots to deploy in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Since then, however, robots have been used to measure radiation levels, clear building debris, and survey the exterior and interior of the plant overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

It will take decades to decommission Fukushima Dai-ichi, and one of the most dangerous, complex tasks is the removal and storage of about 880 tons of highly radioactive molten fuel in three reactor buildings that were operating when the tsunami hit. TEPCO believes mixtures of uranium, zirconium and other metals accumulated around the bottom of the primary containment vessels (PCVs) of the reactors—but the exact composition of the material is unknown. The material is “fuel debris,” which TEPCO defines as overheated fuel that has melted with fuel rods and in-vessel structures, then cooled and re-solidified. The extraction was supposed to begin in 2021 but ran into development delays and obstacles in the extraction route; the coronavirus pandemic also slowed work.

While TEPCO wants a molten fuel sample to analyze for exact composition, getting just a teaspoon of the stuff has proven so tricky that the job is years behind schedule. That may change soon as crews have deployed the telescoping device to target the 237 tons of fuel debris in Unit 2, which suffered less damage than the other reactor buildings and no hydrogen explosion, making it an easier and safer test bed.

“We plan to retrieve a small amount of fuel debris from Unit 2, analyze it to evaluate its properties and the process of its formation, and then move on to large-scale retrieval,” says Tatsuya Matoba, a spokesperson for TEPCO. “We believe that extracting as much information as possible from the retrieved fuel debris will likely contribute greatly to future decommissioning work.”

How TEPCO Plans to Retrieve a Fuel Sample

Getting to the fuel is easier said than done. Shaped like an inverted light bulb, the damaged PCV is a 33-meter-tall steel structure that houses the reactor pressure vessel where nuclear fission took place. A 2-meter-long isolation valve designed to block the release of radioactive material sits at the bottom of the PCV, and that’s where the robot will go in. The fuel debris itself is partly underwater.

The robot arm is being preceded by a smaller telescopic device. The telescopic device, which is trying to retrieve 3 grams of the fuel debris without further contamination to the outside environment, is similar to the larger robot arm, which is better suited for the retrieval of larger bits of debris.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning and UK-based Veolia Nuclear Solutions developed the robot arm to enter small openings in the PCV, where it can survey the interior and grab the fuel. Mostly made of stainless steel and aluminum, the arm measures 22 meters long, weighs 4.6 tons and can move along 18 degrees of freedom. It’s a boom-style arm, not unlike the robotic arms on the International Space Station, that rests in a sealed enclosure box when not extended.

The arm consists of four main elements: a carriage that pushes the assembly through the openings, arm links that can fold up like a ream of dot matrix printer paper, an arm that has three telescopic stages, and a “wand” (an extendable pipe-shaped component) with cameras and a gripper on its tip. Both the arm and the wand can tilt downward toward the target area.

After the assembly is pushed through the PCV’s isolation valve, it angles downward over a 7.2-meter-long rail heading toward the base of the reactor. It continues through existing openings in the pedestal, a concrete structure supporting the reactor, and the platform, which is a flat surface under the reactor.

Then, the tip is lowered on a cable like the grabber in a claw machine toward the debris field at the bottom of the pedestal. The gripper tool at the end of the component has two delicate pincers (only 5 square millimeters), that can pinch a small pebble of debris. The debris is transferred to a container and, if all goes well, is brought back up through the openings and placed in a glovebox: A sealed, negative-pressure container in the reactor building where initial testing can be performed. It will then be moved to a Japan Atomic Energy Agency facility in nearby Ibaraki Prefecture for detailed analysis.

While the gripper on the telescopic device currently being used was able to reach the debris field and grasp a piece of rubble—it’s unknown if it was actually melted fuel—last month, two of the four cameras on the device stopped working a few days later, and the device was eventually reeled back into the enclosure box. Crews confirmed there were no problems with signal wiring from the control panel in the reactor building, and proceeded to perform oscilloscope testing. TEPCO speculates that radiation passing through camera semiconductor elements caused electrical charge to build up, and that the charge will drain if the cameras are left on in a relatively low-dose environment. It was the latest setback in a very long project.

“Retrieving fuel debris from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is an extremely difficult task, and a very important part of decommissioning,” says Matoba. “With the goal of completing the decommissioning in 30 to 40 years, we believe it is important to proceed strategically and systematically with each step of the work at hand.”

This story was updated on 15 October, 2024 to clarify that TEPCO is using two separate tools (a smaller telescopic device and a larger robot arm) in the process of retrieving fuel debris samples.

The water column is hazy as an unusual remotely operated vehicle glides over the seafloor in search of a delicate tilt meter deployed three years ago off the west side of Vancouver Island. The sensor measures shaking and shifting in continental plates that will eventually unleash another of the region’s 9.0-scale earthquakes (the last was in 1700). Dwindling charge in the instruments’ loggers threatens the continuity of the data.

The 4-metric-ton, C$8-million (US $5.8-million) remotely operated vehicle (ROV) is 50 meters from its target when one of the seismic science platforms appears on its sonar imaging system, the platform’s hard edges crystallizing from the grainy background like a surgical implant jumping out of an ultrasound image. After easing the ROV to the platform, operators 2,575 meters up at the Pacific’s surface instruct its electromechanical arms and pincer hands to deftly unplug a data logger, then plug in a replacement with a fresh battery.

This mission, executed in early October, marked an exciting moment for Josh Tetarenko, director of ROV operations at North Vancouver-based Canpac Marine Services. Tetarenko is the lead designer behind the new science submersible and recently dubbed it Jenny in homage to Forrest Gump, because the fictional character named all of his boats Jenny. Swapping out the data loggers west of Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound was part of a weeklong shakedown to test Jenny’s unique combination of dexterity, visualization chops, power, and pressure resistance.

Jenny is only the third science ROV designed for subsea work to a depth of 6,000 meters.

By all accounts Jenny sailed through. Tetarenko says the worst they saw was a leaky O-ring and the need to add some spring to a few bumpers. “Usually you see more things come up the first time you dive a vehicle to those depths,” says Tetarenko.

Jenny’s successful maiden cruise is just as important for Victoria, B.C.–based Ocean Networks Canada (ONC), which operates the NEPTUNE undersea observatory. The North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments array boasts thousands of sensors and instruments, including deep-sea video cameras, seismometers, and robotic rovers sprawled across this corner of Pacific. Most of these are connected to shore via an 812-kilometer power and communications cable. Jenny was custom-designed to perform the annual maintenance and equipment swaps that have kept live data streaming from that cabled observatory nearly continuously for the past 15 years, despite trawler strikes, a fault on its backbone cable, and insults from corrosion, crushing pressures, and fouling.

NEPTUNE remains one of the world’s largest installations for oceanographic science despite a proliferation of such cabled observatories since it went live in 2009. ONC’s open data portal has over 37,000 registered users tapping over 1.5 petabytes of ocean data—information that’s growing in importance with the intensification of climate change and the collapse of marine ecosystems.

Over the course of Jenny’s maiden cruise, her operators swapped devices in and out at half a dozen ONC sites, including at several of NEPTUNE’s five nodes and at one of NEPTUNE’s smaller sister observatories closer to Vancouver.

Inside Jenny

ROV Jenny aboard the Valour, Canpac’s 50-meter offshore workhorse, ahead of October’s NEPTUNE observatory maintenance cruise.Ocean Networks Canada

What makes Jenny so special?

• Jenny is only the third science ROV designed for subsea work to a depth of 6,000 meters.
• Motion sensors actively adjust her 7,000-meter-long umbilical cable to counteract topside wave action that would otherwise yank the ROV around at depth and, in rough seas, could damage or snap the cable.
• Dual high-dexterity manipulator arms are controlled by topside operators via a pair of replica mini-manipulators that mirror the movements.
• Each arm is capable of picking up objects weighing about 275 kilograms, and the ROV itself can transport equipment weighing up to 3,000 kg.
• 11 high-resolution cameras deliver 4K video, supported by 300,000 lumens of lighting that can be tuned to deliver the soft red light needed to observe bioluminescence.
• Dual multibeam sonar systems maximize visibility in turbid water.

Meghan Paulson, ONC’s executive director for observatory operations, says the sonar imaging system will be particularly invaluable during dives to shallower sites where sediments stirred up by waves and weather can cut visibility from meters to centimeters. “It really reduces the risk of running into things accidentally,” says Paulson.

To experience the visibility conditions for yourself, check out recordings of the live video broadcast from the NEPTUNE maintenance cruise. Tetarenko says that next year they hope to broadcast not only the main camera feed but also one of the sonar images.

3D video could be next, according to Canpac ROV pilot and Jenny codesigner, James Barnett. He says they would need to boost the computing power installed topside, to process that “firehose of data,” but insists that real-time 3D is “definitely not impossible.” Tetarenko says the science ROV community is collaborating on software to help make that workable: “3D imagining is kind of the very latest thing that’s being tested on lots of ROV systems right now, but nobody’s really there yet.”

More Than Science

Expansion of the cabled observatory concept is the more certain technological legacy for ONC and NEPTUNE. In fact, the technology has evolved beyond just oceanography applications.

ONC tapped Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) to design and build the Neptune backbone and the French firm delivered a system that has reliably delivered multigigabit Ethernet plus 10 kilovolts of direct-current electricity to the deep sea. Today ASN deploys a second-generation subsea power and communications networking solution, developed with the Norwegian international energy company Equinor.

ASN’s “Direct Current/Fiber Optic” or DC/FO system provides the 100-km backbone for the ARCA subsea neutrino observatory near Sicily, in addition to providing control systems for a growing number of offshore oil and gas installations. The latter include projects led by Equinor and BP where DC/FO networks drive the subsea injection of captured carbon dioxide and monitor its storage below the seabed. Future oil and gas projects will increasingly rely on the cables’ power supply to replace the hydraulic lines that have traditionally been used to operate machinery on the seafloor, according to Ronan Michel, ASN’s product line manager for oil and gas solutions.

Michel says DC/FO incorporates important lessons learned from the Neptune installation. And the latter’s existence was a crucial prerequisite. “The DC/FO solution would probably not exist if Neptune Canada would not have been developed,” says Michel. “It probably gave confidence to Equinor that ASN was capable to develop subsea power and coms infrastructure.”

Simone Giertz came to fame in the 2010s by becoming the self-proclaimed “queen of shitty robots.” On YouTube she demonstrated a hilarious series of self-built mechanized devices that worked perfectly for ridiculous applications, such as a headboard-mounted alarm clock with a rubber hand to slap the user awake.

But Giertz has parlayed her Internet renown into Yetch, a design company that makes commercial consumer products. (The company name comes from how Giertz’s Swedish name is properly pronounced.) Her first release, a daily habit-tracking calendar, was picked up by prestigious outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art design store in New York City. She has continued to make commercial products since, as well as one-off strange inventions for her online audience.

Where did the motivation for your useless robots come from?

Simone Giertz: I just thought that robots that failed were really funny. It was also a way for me to get out of creating from a place of performance anxiety and perfection. Because if you set out to do something that fails, that gives you a lot of creative freedom.

You built up a big online following. A lot of people would be happy with that level of success. But you moved into inventing commercial products. Why?

Giertz: I like torturing myself, I guess! I’d been creating things for YouTube and for social media for a long time. I wanted to try something new and also find longevity in my career. I’m not super motivated to constantly try to get people to give me attention. That doesn’t feel like a very good value to strive for. So I was like, “Okay, what do I want to do for the rest of my career?” And developing products is something that I’ve always been really, really interested in. And yeah, it is tough, but I’m so happy to be doing it. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, as much as there’s a lot of face-palm moments.

Giertz’s every day goal calendar was picked up by the Museum of Modern Art’s design store. Yetch

What role does failure play in your invention process?

Giertz: I think it’s inevitable. Before, obviously, I wanted something that failed in the most unexpected or fun way possible. And now when I’m developing products, it’s still a part of it. You make so many different versions of something and each one fails because of something. But then, hopefully, what happens is that you get smaller and smaller failures. Product development feels like you’re going in circles, but you’re actually going in a spiral because the circles are taking you somewhere.

What advice do you have for aspiring inventors?

Giertz: Make things that you want. A lot of people make things that they think that other people want, but the main target audience, at least for myself, is me. I trust that if I find something interesting, there are probably other people who do too. And then just find good people to work with and collaborate with. There is no such thing as the lonely genius, I think. I’ve worked with a lot of different people and some people made me really nervous and anxious. And some people, it just went easy and we had a great time. You’re just like, “Oh, what if we do this? What if we do this?” Find those people.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Queen of Useless Robots.”

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