Fukishima radiation is destroying robots

[repoman]

As far as computer equipment is concerned, newer is not better for surviving radiation.

Why not have the robots made with circuit boards having extremely thick wiring? Not the current 14 or 22 nm? Those are so thin a bit of radiation can destroy an imbedded 14 or 22 nm "wire" completely.

what year's level of thickness could withstand the radiation there? Could something like that be made again? Would it have enough memory and processing power to be effective? Why not use very old chips and right new code for them? Also, put in enough analog equipment that is radiation proof by being so simple and having macroscopic wiring.



I know about radiation hardening in principle, but of course the details are very complicated but cool. But isn't radiation hardening getting more difficult as the die is shrinking down to 22 and 14 nm?

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

 

[Juma]

As far as computer equipment is concerned, newer is not better for surviving radiation.

Why not have the robots made with circuit boards having extremely thick wiring? Not the current 14 or 22 nm? Those are so thin a bit of radiation can destroy an imbedded 14 or 22 nm "wire" completely.

what year's level of thickness could withstand the radiation there? Could something like that be made again? Would it have enough memory and processing power to be effective? Why not use very old chips and right new code for them? Also, put in enough analog equipment that is radiation proof by being so simple and having macroscopic wiring.

View attachment 10799

I know about radiation hardening in principle, but of course the details are very complicated but cool. But isn't radiation hardening getting more difficult as the die is shrinking down to 22 and 14 nm?

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

The production of integrated circuits depends on very high volumes. The market for rasiarion tough chips are too small

(And your linked video is just bullsjit: radiation levels has not risen in the fukushima plant. They have simply reached further into the core to measure where they havent measured before)

 

[repoman]

fair enough...

Are very old chips immune to the radiation in the core because of much thicker "wires"?

 

[DrZoidberg]

Microprocessors are sensitive things. Radiation is nasty. Either they build the processor and wiring robust enough to withstand everything, at which point it's gets super heavy as well as requiring them to scrap all old programming and build purpose built software from scratch. Or they use a regular off-the shelf processor, do their best to shield it. The expensive bit about building autonomous robots is the programming. But we live in a world with a lot of code being written, much of which is re-usable. Testing is a huge part of the cost of developing software. If you use an off the shelf product, it's already been tested in a multitude of ways.

I'm willing to bet that they did a cost/benefit analysis and decided that losing a robot once in a while due to the radiation was a better deal than creating an invinceable droidzilla.

There's also the possibility that the robot broke down for any number of non-radiation reasons. There's a lot that can break on a robot. The radiation makes maintenance a bitch. Not only inside the reactor. But once it's been inside and pulled out, it's a secondary source of radiation. Once it's been inside, it can't be reused for anything else anyway.

It makes way more sense today to go with cheap disposable robots. The opposite situation that they have for building a Mars rover.

 

[Malintent]

Or they use a regular off-the shelf processor, do their best to shield it.

^ This ^

It is trivially easy to design a radiation-proof housing. It is not cost effective or practical to try to use older circuit technology to only partially protect the system, while losing many degrees of magnitude in processing power. Your smartphone may be sensitive to radiation, but it has far more processing power than the entire computer system that got us to the moon and back.

 

[barbos]

It's not about chip wires, which are fine. Radiation creates charges inside thick layer of silicon.
Radiation hardened chips for space are made from very thin layer of silicon on sapphire. Such computers cost around $300K