For all its benefits, nuclear energy presents numerous challenges to researchers, engineers, and operators—including residual radiation that can persist long after an accident, particularly in the aftermath of unintended leaks. This radiation can damage or disable conventional electronics, complicating ongoing monitoring and recovery efforts, such as those currently happening at Japan’s damaged Fukushima plant.
A potential solution could come in the form of a wireless receiver chip capable of withstanding 500 kilograys (a measurement unit for absorbed radiation doses) of radiation. That’s 1,000 times higher than the threshold that semiconductors typically begin to malfunction under radiation exposure, according to a statement from the Institute of Science Tokyo in Japan (translation mine). The ultimate goal is to devise a single-chip module capable of both transmitting and receiving signals for maintaining and investigating the interiors of nuclear plants, the team said. If that happens, the damaged Fukushima plant’s wi-fi network would go fully wireless.
The results were first presented at last month’s IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
An ongoing calamity
Incidentally, 2026 marks the 15th anniversary of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, during which a powerful earthquake triggered a devastating radiation leak. Officials in Japan are still “locked in a long-term, onerous effort to fully decommission the plant,” the statement explained, citing infrastructure decay from hydrogen explosions and strict limitations on how long investigators can stay at the site.
“This not only complicates site access but also obstructs the planning and deployment of equipment,” the team said in the release. “As a result, most decommissioning work has depended not on humans but on robots and drones. Thus, such wireless devices are becoming an imperative element in plant decommissioning.”
At the same time, most remote devices inside or nearby nuclear plants depend on Ethernet cables. While that offers connection stability, keeping these cables—which often require complex cabling—physically intact and out of the way for human workers has impacted the safety and efficiency of decommissioning projects, the researchers added.
Finding a cable-free solution
The goal of the researchers, therefore, was to realize a stable, wireless connection from inside high-radiation environments. For the experiment, the team tested a prototype for the chip, made of silicon materials known to withstand radiation. Their design minimized the number of transistors, as transistors potentially increase the risk of impurities building up inside the device. Instead, they selected larger dimensions for each transistor to increase the chip’s radiation resistance.
According to an English version of the press release, the chip also “includes a low-noise amplifier to boost weak incoming signals, followed by a variable-gain amplifier to adjust signal strength.” All this minute, yet critical, attention to detail resulted in a chip that showed little decrease in performance after exposure to a whopping 500 kilograys, as the team confirmed in empirical tests.
Getting fully remote
The chip’s performance is on par with existing receiver chips, the researchers added in the Japanese statement, so engineers could easily deploy it for robots and drones used in decommissioning projects. Alternatively, the chip’s high radiation resistance could make it useful for space or fusion research as well.
Eventually, they hope to complete a full communication device that can both send and receive signals from within nuclear plants. Fabricating a transmitter is trickier than a receiver, they admitted, as transmitters are more prone to radiation-induced degradation.
“We will build upon this finding to create new circuits or improve radiation resistance, using materials like diamond semiconductors,” the team said. “From that, we’ll advance the safety and efficiency of remote operations in decommissioning projects and in more extreme environments.”
