The rise of the drones

Researchers from Bristol University in the UK have developed a lightweight flying drone to map radiation levels around the Fukushima power station, three years after the tsunami that triggered a nuclear emergency in Japan.

The drone will help the delicate clean-up, by going into areas which are largely inaccessible and identifying the worst-affected hotspots, allowing engineers to plot a safe decommissioning process for the four crippled reactors.

This highlights how the military surveillance technology is now finding commercial uses. Slowly but surely, drones are appearing in various sectors and taking over dangerous and dull jobs.

In another other example, as part of a trend towards increasingly data-driven agriculture, farmers are turning to drones to monitor their land in detail, pinpointing outbreaks of disease and infestation, and checking soil humidity.

Last year, Jeff Bezos, CEO of online retailer Amazon announced the company was testing the use of unmanned drones to deliver parcels. Germany’s Deutsche Post DHL is doing the same.

Further down the line, drones may be deployed in firefighting, search and rescue missions and monitoring offshore energy infrastructures.

Regulators are racing to catch up with the burgeoning industry. Several European countries have opened their airspace to unmanned aircraft, but until now the issue has been legislated on a country-by-country basis.

In April the European Union set a goal of crafting the legal framework to allow drones to work regularly in EU airspace from 2016. The European Commission wants, “European industry to become a global leader for this emerging technology.” The US, which is also still in the rule-making process for the use of small drones, expects to set out guidelines late next year at the earliest.

Sweden, France and the UK already allow private drone operations. The Commission says that in France, the number of approved operators increased from 86 in December 2012 to 431 in February 2014. Sweden and the UK issued more than 200 operators' licences each in recent years.

Italy has just issued new regulations on drones. In Spain, the Ministry of Public Works is working on legislation to allow the commercial use of drones in non-urban areas.

Drone surveyors

The damage the 2011 tsunami caused at the Fukushima nuclear power plant was so severe that more than 100,000 nearby residents had to be relocated. The Bristol University researchers think the drone can help in surveying the abandoned, poisoned areas to determine if it is safe enough for people to return.

“At the moment, one of the main ways to collect radiation data is to send a man with a pen, paper and Geiger counter,” James MacFarlane, leader of the Bristol team, told Science|Business. The new drone will remove the current unavoidable extra costs of safety and risk of exposure. “There’s a lot of cost savings in indirect ways,” he said.

In May, MacFarlane and his three-man team travelled to Fukushima to discuss the terms of a contract with the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company. “It’s been a minefield of legal and contract-writing in the last few weeks,” said MacFarlane.

The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant drew renewed attention to the dangers of nuclear power. It is now the world’s most hazardous industrial clean-up sites, with a litany of reported problems, from leaky tanks storing irradiated water, to the breakdown of contaminated water treatment systems.

The drone is fitted with sensors and thermal cameras and is flown by a pilot on the ground. Because it is able to fly at low altitudes, it can measure radiation in greater detail than a helicopter or other aircraft, MacFarlane said.

The drone development project started two years ago and has had just under £1 million in funding to date. The whole process has been incredibly rapid, moving from technology readiness level zero to seven in 18 months, and resulting in the formation of a spin-out,  ImiTec, to commercialise the technology. The company will lease drones for somewhere between £50 - £80,000 per year.

The team has previously demonstrated the autonomous radiation monitoring technology in various weather conditions around several parts of the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria UK, sewage plants in Somerset, and a former uranium mine in Romania.

Eventually, the goal is to have radiation monitoring systems flying regularly over as many nuclear sites as possible. “Ideally, we’d love to see two or three of these in every nuclear site in the world,” MacFarlane said.

MacFarlane thinks the ImiTec drones could have other applications, for example, detecting unexploded ordinance.

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