IWAKI, Fukushima Prefecture--Cheers erupted among students here as a rectangular robot chugged its way noisily up and over a 15-centimeter grade, a preview of the obstacles that await it at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

“I was so relieved to see the robot move,” said Takumi Takeda, a student at the Fukushima National College of Technology, in January. 

Takeda built the robot along with two other students at his school.

The probe, designed primarily to provide a video feed, is expected to be sent into one of the damaged reactor buildings at the plant in April or later.

Their robot is small in size, but it, alongside many other robots to be introduced, is huge in the decades-long process of decommissioning the crippled nuclear complex.

The foremost challenge in the task is how to recover melted nuclear fuel from the reactors.

But radiation levels remain extremely high inside reactor buildings even 11 years after the triple meltdown at the plant, defying access by operators seeking to ascertain what it is like inside the structures.

Robots such as the one designed by Takeda and his team will be mobilized instead of humans to take images and videos of inaccessible areas.

Takeda, 20, is now deeply committed to doing what he can with the development of robots to assist in the formidable decommissioning task.

But he did not sign up for this initially. His genuine interest in robots led him to get involved in the work. 

When the nuclear accident unfolded on March 11, 2011, he was a third-grade student living in inland Sukagawa city in the prefecture, away from the plant that sits on the prefecture’s coast.

But the disaster dramatically transformed the boy’s daily life.

Sandboxes in parks in his community were covered by plastic sheets to protect people from radiation exposure. Dosimeters were distributed to schoolchildren to measure their daily radiation doses. Some pupils transferred to his school after their families evacuated from their homes near the plant.

“I knew something very serious had occurred,” Takeda recalled thinking.

But his sense of urgency waned with the passage of time, and he gradually returned to his life before the disaster.

The inspiration to develop robots came when he watched a TV program featuring contests between robots made by students.

Takeda was mesmerized by the exacting movements of a robot climbing over stacks of obstacles.

After enrolling in college, Takeda worked day and night, pursuing his passion for making robots.

In his fourth year, he and his classmates entered the Fifth Creative Robot Contest for Decommissioning, which was themed on the recovery of melted nuclear fuel.

It was sponsored by the government-affiliated Japan Atomic Energy Agency, which develops nuclear and decommissioning technology, and other entities.

Prior to that, Takeda had avoided learning more about the nuclear accident as he found all news about it depressing.

His team completed a robot called Mehikari that can traverse narrow pipeways to go inside a structure simulating a reactor building before it returns with mock nuclear debris.

The robot is equipped with wheels that can be turned from front to back and from side to side and with the capability to build a digital map with its sensors.

Their robot won the top prize in the competition of all the entries from across Japan.

A visit to the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant--his first trip there--last November was an eye-opening experience, Takeda said.

He had a chance to inspect the nuclear complex after companies sponsoring the robotic contest asked him to join the development of robots for the decommissioning work.

What he saw on his way to the plant were ghost towns, white barricades put up to ban entry, an expanse of empty plots with overgrown weeds and houses with broken windows.

A quake-proof building in the complex, which served as the control center to respond to the nuclear crisis, was filled with screens showing operators manipulating robots to spray water onto the outer walls of reactor buildings in the decontamination effort.

“What I witnessed during the inspection made me realize that the nuclear accident is not over yet,” Takeda said.

He did not have a keen awareness that the decommissioning of the plant was taking place in his prefecture while he was attending college.

But his thinking has changed since he saw firsthand what the nuclear disaster has wrought.

“I want to do what I can in the decommissioning,” Takeda said, adding he hopes to transfer to Fukushima University in the spring to continue his robot projects.