Wi-Fi That Can Withstand a Nuclear Reactor: This receiver chip can take it

Summary

Researchers have made a Wi-Fi receiver that’s tough enough to work inside a nuclear reactor. They hope the receiver might be part of a wireless communications system for robotics used to decommission reactors.Yasuto Narukiyo, a graduate student at the Institute of Science Tokyo, presented the wireless receiver at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), in San Francisco in February. The receiver endured a total radiation dose of 500 kilograys, orders of magnitude higher than the doses typically tolerated by electronics in outer space.After the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, engineers began using robots to help characterize and clean up the site. Most of these require local area network (LAN) cables that can get tangled, says Narukiyo. His team, which includes his advisor Atsushi Shirane and Masaya Miyahara of Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), is aiming to develop a wireless system for controlling robots in this harsh environment.Even under less dramatic circumstances, nuclear plants don’t last forever, and they need to be safely dismantled and decontaminated so the sites can be reused, a process called decommissioning. The process is lengthy, and risks exposing people to radiation, which is why engineers hope robots can come to the rescue. The need for such robots is only growing. According to a 2024 study, of 204 reactors that have been closed, only 11 plants with a capacity over 100 megawatts have been fully decommissioned, and 200 more reactors will reach the end of their lifetimes in the next 20 years.While electronics for space exploration are typically required to endure radiation doses of 100 to 300 grays over three years, a robot operating in a nuclear reactor needs to endure more than 500 kGy over the course of six months, says Narukiyo—at least 1,000 times the dosage. A robotic arm made by KUKA was able to withstand just 164.55 Gy of damage before failing. For comparison, the lens of ...