Japan Had an Army of Robots, but Not One Could Help Fix Fukushima

Japan has more and better robots than anyone. There are a , more than in any other country. They have robot baseball players. They have an actual mechwarrior.

Anywhere else, it'd be a weird question, but in Japan, it's a valid one: Why didn't Japan have a high-tech robot to defuse the nuclear crisis at Fukushima? Why was the most roboticized nation in the world reduced to manually dumping water on the cooling towers?

Fortune Magazine thinks there's a simple answer: Japan simply didn't think it would need them.

"For a start, neither Japan's nuclear power industry nor the government concede that an accident like this could ever happen. They have long held that all of Japan reactors are 'absolutely safe," Dr. MasashiGoto, a Japanese nuclear engineer who worked on the containment design, told Fortune.

According to the government's public stance, the reactors were failproof—and developing a nuke plant-fixing robot would appear to contradict that notion.

Instead, after the crisis struck, Japan actually had to borrow robots from the US. After two engineers were seriously burned after they had to stand in pools of highly radioactive water to attempt to repair damage to a turbine room, the Obama administration sent over a fleet of radiation-resistant robots that could be operated remotely.

Japan eventually brought in one of its own robots, Quince, to gather data within the radiation-contaminated walls of the world's most famous nuclear reactor. Somewhat ironically, the robot was primarily used to collect samples of debris in order to determine whether the radiation levels posed a danger to the human workers.

And ever since the meltdown, Japan has been working vigorously to develop nuclear repair bots. After all, cleaning up and stabilizing the reactor is going to cost billions of dollars, and may take 40 years. Its even led to what some pundits have termed a "robot renaissance" and "Fukushima's silver lining" in Japan—a return to highly utilitarian, unglamorous robots.

Toshiba, for instance, built a four-legged "nuclear-proof" robot that's ostensibly capable of carrying 20 kilograms of equipment, and picking itself up if it stumbles while navigating debris. Unfortunately, Reuters reports that the bot seized up during its demonstration last November, and isn't quite ready to head to Fukushima.

Japan is looking to start up its nuclear reactors again, after most of them have been offline for two years. This time, however, with public more wary than ever about the government and the nuclear sector, the authorities have an enormous incentive to have an emergency plan firmly in place. And it's probably going to involve a whole lot of robots.