> a person exposed for less than a minute would be a dead man walking.
Yup, fortunately robots aren't alive
We know how to fabricate telezooms to take a photo to an animal at 400m distance. We use periscopes rutinely that do not need electronic necesarily. We know how to take a photo to the reflection in a mirror and zoom it later. We have the technology to make a mirror with a very finely polished metal surface (would be that sensible to radioactivity?), and we have all the time in the world to make a big photo secuentially from many small simple photos, ommatidium like. with less info encoded ...
Why we need electrons when we could use photons and an optic cable to translate the info at 100 km in some fractions of second? What happens with an optic cable when radioactivity hits it?
Optical materials of all kinds are vulnerable to darkening, clouding, and embrittlement by much lower levels of ionizing radiation than those in the reactor [1]. Darkening along the length of an optical fiber adds up quick, and will quickly render it opaque. Shielding won't help you at these radiation levels; you would need inches of lead cladding [2], and even then your fiber optics might not have a useful lifespan, exposed to at least tens of Sv/h along much of the length. And shielding offers nearly zero protection against neutron radiation.
Also note that the radiation in the reactor can heat the internal elements of your perisccope by hundreds of degrees, so without a cooling system your optical system's tolerances are at risk. Remember to make everything waterproof, and robust against shock and vibration.
After you figure all that out, you still need to get your periscope into the reactor somehow. Humans can't go closer than about a kilometer, and any robot you use must be able to navigate industrial wreckage.
I don't expect being simple or they would had solved it in the last eight years, but exploring the idea further will not do much harm probably.
Stainless steel is waterproof and robust against shock and vibration so these points are solved yet.
The tolerance question is more problematic, steel can elevate their temperature to thousands of degrees without melting, but a mirror like that would suffer probably.
I ignore how darkening and clouding would affect in this case. Maybe the surface could be cleaned somehow?. Can we expect much embrittlement in metal?.
I suppose that would need to sacrifice at least one (or several) simpler robots just to put all the mirrors sync in place before to die. We would need need also a source of light, but spontaneous incandescence of a softer matherial should be easy to achieve.
Yup, fortunately robots aren't alive
We know how to fabricate telezooms to take a photo to an animal at 400m distance. We use periscopes rutinely that do not need electronic necesarily. We know how to take a photo to the reflection in a mirror and zoom it later. We have the technology to make a mirror with a very finely polished metal surface (would be that sensible to radioactivity?), and we have all the time in the world to make a big photo secuentially from many small simple photos, ommatidium like. with less info encoded ...
Why we need electrons when we could use photons and an optic cable to translate the info at 100 km in some fractions of second? What happens with an optic cable when radioactivity hits it?