The Robots of Chernobyl
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster was an unspeakable human disaster. It also marked the beginning of a sad saga for a group of robots (though one that was obviously far less tragic). The nuclear waste needed to be cleaned up, but it was so radioactive that there was no system in place to deal with it. The Soviet government sent in around 60 robots to clear debris. Many of them couldn’t handle the effects of the radiation, suffering electronic and battery failures and breaking down, ultimately becoming contaminated nuclear waste themselves.
“We learned that robots are not the great remedy for everything,” Valery Legasov of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow said in 1987. “Where there was very high radiation, the robot ceased to be a robot—the electronics quit working.”
Decades later, the robots are finally getting a little recognition, with brief appearances in the 2019 HBO Chernobyl mini-series on the disaster. For a deeper dive, there’s also a great documentary short on the Chernobyl robots on YouTube.
