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Robot Saves the Day at Radiation Lab
An anonymous reader writes "Nature.com is reporting that records released this week by the US defense department read almost like a bad movie plot. Back in October a high-security radiation lab had a cylinder filled with radiation get trapped in its delivery tube network. Fortunately a specially designed bomb-disposal robot was able to retrieve the canister before the radiation was able to eat its way free.
Dupe of http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/ 17/0226200&tid=216&tid=14
This version links to a different story though...
(fp?)
chown -R us ~you/base
First the "Robot Saves Troops" story and now this. Pretty cool how robots are actually helping us nowadays.
"By now, the robot had been in the radiation zone for 90 minutes. The team decided to regroup, but the robot's electronics had failed and it was rooted to the spot. Thankfully, the team had tied a rope around the machine, and it was hauled in, almost knocking over a radiation shield in the process."
This part sounds remarkably familiar...
"On the third day, and after three weeks of continuous warning sirens..."
Whoah. It took them THREE DAYS? I'm glad this wasn't (obviously) a really serious problem. If it were some sort of radiation based bomb, they'd get fried.
From reading these two articles, it seems that if we could somehow shield these robots from outside radiation, these jobs would be done in a flash.
Unfortunately, we need them to recieve radation because if they DON'T, we can't communicate with them.
Now, I'm not a physicist, but might a Faraday Cage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage) built with an appropriately sized mesh do the job? Just as a microwave lets some radiation out (we can see the burrito cooking inside) while keeping the harmful radiation in (we don't get toasted by the microwaves), couldn't this be used to do the reverse, that is, allow communication in while shielding the robot from radiation?
I realize that these cages must be in a specific shape to work correctly, but if the core components at least, can be shielded, this go a long way towards solving our problems.
Heck, the arms and stuff we can even make (god forbid) mechanical, perhaps in such a way that they won't get owned by the radiation at all.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
the base's Gamma Irradiation Facility was paralysed when a cylinder containing cobalt-60 became lodged in one of the lab's air-pressure tubes,
Yikes! Cobalt-60 is almost as bad as it gets. Cobalt 60 radiation dosages are almost twice as bad as the actual dosage of radiation one would get from the fallout of an actual atomic device which sort of begs the question of what they are doing with it? Are they modeling fallout? Or are they experimenting with dirty bombs? Lining the inside of atomic devices with heavy metals and other elements is a way to create much more radioactive bombs that have long lasting radiation effects.
Although there *are* civilian applications such as medical therapy devices....
The canister, about the size of a salt cellar, was jammed against a seesaw-shaped switch inside the tube that was stuck in the wrong orientation.
OK, so this sounds like bad design just waiting for someone to screw up and reveal the design flaw.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
"It sounds like something you might pitch to a Hollywood studio. A high-security US radiation lab is thrown into turmoil when a cylinder spewing out deadly radiation gets trapped in its network of delivery tubes. A robot is sent to try and free the canister before the radiation eats away at its circuits. After a string of failures, the intrepid machine saves the day."
Not hardly. For that you'd need Tommy Lee Jones and terrorists to some how get involved.
I didn't know 'radiation' was tangable. I'll have to update the Wikipedia article...
After the fearless heroics displayed by the enslaved mechazoid, the team nicknamed the bot Mighty Mouse (well actually, M^2). Obviously some old school nerds work at the White Sands Missile Range, and possibly because Mighty Mouse's arch rival was Oil Can Harry, an evil cat. Oil can, meet cobalt-60!
M^2 is not quite as compact as the nick would suggest (judging from the pic ITFA, it looks a bit like Number 5). Still smaller were the Exocomps, those self-aware bots that, given human liberty to choose, saved the day in TNG S6-E9, "The Quality of Life". I can't wait until robots can fly, and make decisions for us. Then I can sit around and read Slashdot all day while my Exocomp does all the unpleasant tasks I need done, like going to work every day, doing my laundry, cooking and cleaning for me.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Questions are begged:
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
On the third day, and after three weeks of continuous warning sirens, the team sent in the robot with a metal screwdriver. It unscrewed the plate, dislodged the switch, and sent the tube safely to its storage bay.
Dude you mean the government spent $24 million on this project and all we needed to fix it was a screwdriver?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Very good. Now send the robot to Iraq and see how it does against IEDs.
I mean say WHAT? Are the little gamma rays gonna start taking apart the shielding? I dont' think so. They can destroy the solid state components of the robot of course.
So not only is it a DUP the right-up is by someone whose entire education about radiation appears to have come from watching 1950s science fiction movies.
OR misread the article.
But "radiation" can't be stored in a container. Radioactive material, however, can be. Add to that the fact that the submitter was anonymous, and this story should not have been picked up. Hmm. I wonder whats on digg right now.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
http://www.robotcombat.com/video_oldglory_hi.html
...tell me the poster is joking around with the 'filled with radiation' and 'before the radiation was able to eat its way free' comments.
I was filled with radiation once.....once.
The cobalt, powerful enough to kill a person in half a minute, got jammed between its storage area and the site where it was to be used to test the effects of radiation on vehicles and circuit boards.
http://www.freebsd.org
I smell the next "based on a true story" hollywood stinker. Whoopee!!
The blockbuster event of Summer 2006: Robot Hero
Starring Ben Affleck as the fucking robot.
Just because they used a Hoover to suck out the tube doesn't mean that the vacuum can suddenly be called a robot!
Unfortunately, we need them to recieve radation because if they DON'T, we can't communicate with them.
You actually give a solution with your comment...
the team had tied a rope around the machine, and it was hauled in
What if instead of a rope it was a well-shielded data cable? Run the robot on a lengthy cable coming off a spool, and then you don't need to use wireless communication.
If they couldn't get the cannister out, would flooding the tube with some form of radiation blocking/absorbing material have worked? Maybe they could have injected it with molten lead, leaded water, or some other radiation dampening material (probably not a permanent solution, but a time-giver).
Danger, Will Robinson...Danger...
tell us why the robot isn't permanently irradiated
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Damn, that has to be the largest chunk of Cobalt-60 on the planet. Is it me, or has the quality of proofreading gone completely out the window these days?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Cobalt 60 decays via Beta (electron) emission (and also emits an anti-neutrino), and has a half-life of 5.2714 years. Of course, electrons don't go far in air and are easily shielded, but Co60 emits gamma-rays (like very "blue" X-Rays) with an energy of 1.33 and 1.17 MeV (MeV= the energy it takes to move an electron from a long ways away to a potential of 1 million volts). Co60 is commonly used in industry for sterilizing and for killing off bacteria on food (it is also used in gamma-ray photography industrially). Cobalt 60 can be produced from bombarding iron with nuclear radiation, like inside a nuclear reactor or near a nuclear explosion.
Wikipedia article about Cobalt
Radioactive bomb disposal is fortunately not a frequently-encountered problem - most bomb-handling robots are more designed for conventional explosives, and while it's nice to have well-protected electronics, you'll only need to replace them if the bomb explodes, at which point it's no longer an emergency so cheap easily-replaced parts are just as good. However, Sandia Labs is the kind of place where radioactive explosive Bad Things can happen, and you'd think they'd have some rad-hard bomb-handler robots. After all, their job is designing and building Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Really, REALLY long lead arm. Problem solved.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
is still alive.
Though, on a positive point, this is the first dupe in a week or two.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I'm unsure why it took 2 days to decide to unscrew a panel and 2 attempts to decide that plastic screwdrivers don't work worth poo. Or why they have a "1950's document delivery system" transporting extremely dangerous items. The real heroes of the story: the metal screwdriver and the rope used to haul the broken robot out.
NeverEndingBillboard.com
NeverEndingBillboard.com
I forget if they also use gamma rays to image concrete, or if that's other kinds of radiation, but there are times you want to crash the tank into the wall and see how badly you bent the wall.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...anyone remember the one where they figured out the one bad robot with heat radiation?
Sounds almost like the episode in Star Wars one when R2D2 fixed the shield generator. I hope the hero robot gets the same royal treatment like R2D2. Robots love a good polishing job (and they hate to be naked).
A real movie would have the robot hold his screwdriver up against the glass as his circuits melted.
>>On the third day, and after three weeks of continuous warning sirens...
Their sirens must have a 'Mute' button in order to work under continuous sirens for three weeks.
A slashbot that stopped radioactive dupes would be great.
(Note, if someone has already made this comment, and therefore, my comment is a dupe, the robot could have prevented that too... Maybe a robot mod?)
(I think I am going to end up in Troll hell for this one. Ah well, been over 5 years since I have had a comment at -1...)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Mayak, where the Soviet Union pumped out tens of tons of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Some info on how the Soviets fixed the 'it got stuck' problems - no fancy robots for them. http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=so9 9larin
"A complete repair would have taken at least 12 months..."
""That meant that the irradiated uranium fuel had to be pulled up by hand into the central hall of the reactor and placed in a special storage area. Then, when the repair was finished, the elements had to be loaded back into the reactor. Over time, we unloaded and reloaded 39,000 fuel elements. All of the plant's personnel took part in this work and they received huge doses of radiation. The repairs were finished in two months."
"several hundred kilograms of freshly irradiated nuclear fuel got stuck--men from everywhere in the plant were called out, and one after another they used long steel rods to push the elements into the apparatus. The only protection they had was cotton overalls and gloves."
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"Please insert another $50,000 to continue" Doh!
Table-ized A.I.
a nuke with something extra packed in too. to kill more people and keep on killing people for years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salted_bomb
Hooray for bots! I've been tracking this story, and These Guys seem to have the story straight.
They do everything that humans can't.
Unfortunately the robot failed anyway, with only 5 minutes left until the radiation leaked out, destroying civilisation in an evil terrorist plot. Bruce Willis had to throw himself into the chamber and heroically sacrifice his life in order to correct the problem manually. After fixing the radiation leak, he managed to crawl into and activate an experimental cryogenic chamber stored in the same room, before expiring from the overdose of radiation. The probability of him being revived for a sequel is high.
a high-security radiation lab had a cylinder filled with radiation get trapped in its delivery tube network.
Getting things stuck in your tube sucks.
The number of repetative posts on slashdot in the last few weeks really is impressive. This 'story' ran just a few days ago and got thoroughly torn to bits. How many times must we beat the dead horse?
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
I'm a citizen of the United States of America and I love my country so much it hurts. I trust the government about as much as I would trust a starving cannibal as a bedmate though.
We're no longer producing nuke'cler weapons? Why, just because the government promises they're not? Grow up.
...is what the robot's gonna do with it now that it's got the radioactive death cartridge?
What did these guys think? That the robot was gonna get there and say, "Ok, here you go guys, you can keep the pesky canister filled with enough cobalt-60 to terrorize human civilization..."
Um, hello? This is how sci-fi stories start not end.
Apparantly, Robots can stop radiation. But they can't save Slashdot editors from dupes...
:P
More evidence they don't read their own site.
and apparently you can't spell "Apparently"... more evidence that you don't read what you actually write...
all kidding aside... my point is that we all make mistakes
I want a free day pass for the next dupe
. . . they had a specially designed bomb disposal robot on hand.
I'd hate to be around when a cylinder full of radiation get trapped with nothing but one of those generic, off-the-shelf bomb disposal robots on hand.
"...before the radiation was able to eat its way free." That's choice. Sounds like the tagline from some poorly-researched sci-fi or action flick. Besides, the radiation was already present outside the canister; otherwise, there would have been no danger to personnel and no radiation alarms sounding.
As for the comment about the container being filled with radiation, I could excuse that as simply a mistake of terminology. You can fill the container with active or contaminated material, but you can't fill it with radiation itself. Contamination is the shit. Radiation is just the stink.
A more practical analogy would be light as an example of radiation. You can fill a box with flashlights, and you can shine light inside a box, but you can't fill the box with light.
The article makes reference to the radiation eating away at the robot's circuits. This is pure speculation, but I think this may have been a reference to the effect that high energy gamma radiation can have on digital circuits such as memory. That would be a bit of a metaphor, not a literal corrosion of the circuitry. Certainly, it does not imply that the canister was in danger of impending failure.
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"? Major: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action
Somehow, this reminds me of the time when I was in the drive through to the bank. So i was sitting there, put my check in the little container, set the container back on the little pedestal, and pressed the button. The container shot up about three feet, before lodging itself securley in the tube, unable to move. I wonder if something similar happened to the government...except with a pile of slimy green radioactive death-goo, instead of a check. At least, thats the image I get when I look at this story.
A plucky little expensive robot was destroyed while saving the day recently at the White Sands missile range after gross incompetence in the fields of engineering and risk analysis manifested as a lump of highly radioactive substance becoming stuck in a tube, prompting technicians to attempt to fix the problem basically by kicking it really hard, which broke it even worse, at which point several people valiantly tried to fix the problem with a tool that was not designed for that purpose--since nobody had apparently thought of designing a tool for that purpose--while being continually subjected to blaring sirens and flashing lights, which unfortunately could not be shut off during this tense and delicate operation, leading to much silliness, such as repeatedly barbecuing various bits of plastic. Eventually, they managed to get the pesky thing unstuck while exposing only a couple of people to only a tiny bit of deadly radiation. Somebody then named the robot after a cartoon character.
The genius who spun this one off on the media is the unsung hero of this story.
I'm stuck with MREs and freeze dried crap.
There are other options. Like meaty travel companions and a big knife.
paintball
There is a difference from making occasional human error and sheer incompetence. This isn't the first dupe by any stretch of the imagination. Its like letting a truck driver stay with your company after he has been in hundreds of accidents.
hey, the article in this post looks soooo similar to the article in Friday's post "Radiation Robot Makes Troops Safer".
That is they problem with robots; you teach the trick once, and there they go repeating it forever!
...just send in Vin Diesel to retrieve it?
Go robots! Woohoo!
IMHO, it was really meant "they would be fried" and not "they would be fired", as you assume.
...
:-/
OTOH, such things feel like someone having wandered near a deep chasm: we were this || close to disaster. And you know what? The "good" outcome is frightening to say the least.
All things considered, this is like a tale by Asimov (one about a mining robot in Mercury IIRC).
And now I think they downplayed the much necessary medievalists role in the recent "I, Robot" movie...
Why couldn't they have used sneakernet like everyone else?
Im telling you, those are dupe waves
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
The robot looks like your standard ANDROS brand rov, pretty capable. ANDROS type robots are typically designed to blow up suitcases or (these days) IEDs with a water blaster or other single shot thing.
.max
They are _not_ designed for fiddly little twiddling work, like unscrewing screws. And they also don't typ. have stereoscopic vision.
So why couldn't they use lead shielding at the site: probably NO ROOM in the pipe-switching installation. And, remember the robot would have to build the wall itself, brick by brick, picking up dose with each step.
Since these things aren't designed for operation in a nuclear holocaust, their elex are typ not all that rad hard; they're expensive enuf as it is, it's typ. not worth it to outfit rad hardness to them. Just yank it out with a rope and replace the driver boards.
The manpulator arm camera would probably be the first casualty as the CCD gates deterioriated under the rad blizzard.
Finally, a faraday cage for gamma rays is just nonesense, and a misconception unworthy of slashdot. Everyone who thinks they should have used one, please go back to high school physics class, ask Doktor Professer for remediation and apologize for graduating. Faraday cages work for photons generated by the electron shell; gamma rays come from proton and neutron decay, and are of staggeringly higher energy and staggeringly lower (smaller) wavelengths.
The purpose (from the article) of the C0-60 was to test radiation resistance/hardness of materials and elex. Nothing to do with dirty bombs, we use such sources all over the country all the time.
FWIW, i've measured a (wrongly) unmasked Co-60 sourse with a survey meter from almost a half mile away, through two buildings. These suckers put out the zoomies. V. Scary. When they say: kill anyone who got close to it, they're not exaggerating.
It is impossible for a tube to be filled with "radiation". Radiation would be emitted spherically in all directions from the tube, subject to the inverse square law. That is, unless one was far enough away from the tube for it to be considered a point source. What the tube was filled with is "contamination", which is the source of the radiation. Contamination is the "sh*t"...radiation is the "stink".
High levels of radiation has a nack for breaking down many materials very quickly. Plastics and organic compounds seem to suffer the most, as the insulation on wiring turns brittle and flaky quite fast at about 1k rem. Working at a CANDU nuclear power plant, everything but the video cameras that monitor the reactor face uses special wires to prevent common short circuits. So you can tell from that that we replace the video cams quite often. Or worse (and usually the case), they stop working and we don't get a front seat view of a LOCA (loss of cooling accident) when it happens =)
... use the phrase "begs the question" properly.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
We're no longer producing nuke'cler weapons? Why, just because the government promises they're not? Grow up.
No, you can believe that we are no longer producing them because we have plenty. There isn't a need to build any more. The only thing the US is doing in terms of nuclear weapons right now is R&D in how to build better ones, maintaining the current stock pile, and slowly dropping the number of overall weapons.
Certainly the US is still doing R&D, but R&D is long term project aimed at preparing for an unknown threat far in the future. For all of the threats that exist today and within the next 20 years or so, the US has more then enough weapons and then some. The US could flatten Russia, China, and the EU at the same time, though granted, Russia and the EU could flatten the US back (and even China could offer a little hurt).
LOL!
That's actually very stupid.
And not funny.
The army already makes extensive use of robots to investigate and disarm IEDs. If they come across something that looks suspicious, they send out this tracked robot about the size of a dog with a gripper arm and a camera. They can investigate the IED with the camera. If they determine it to be an IED, they can give the robot a block of C4 in its gripper arm. The robot takes the C4 to the IED, drops it, backs off, and then they blow the IED.
I imagine the robot they used in this lab is a tad bit more expensive then the disposable IED robots that army uses.
How were they able to pull it back without harming themselves? The radiation doesnt contaminate the robot?
Some sort of crystaline carbon?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The remaining question is: What exactly is in a can of whoop-ass?
Program Intellivision!
Just another reason to buy rock'em sock'em robots
Concrete made with iron ore pellets, at least 3 feet thick, was what was used in the hot cell area of Argonne when I was touring there. The walls were made of that up to 8 or 9 feet high. And there was still a warning light anytime the Co-60 source was out.
The work was done behind a several feet of leaded glass, with master slave manipulators.
In summary, effective shielding is heavy.
Bless your cybernetic soul! *sniff*
-- Boycott Shell
There is no way a bomb circuit could withstand that radiation it melted plastic I'm sure your circuit board would become a puddle of radio active goo. Not to mention you would need multiple robots to assemble and place said bomb unless you can build a bomb and place it in less than 30 seconds.
There are more ways to set off bombs than by electronic circuits. Heck, you could make it a water-clock based bomb if you were so inclined. As for assembly, lead-lined carrying cases are your friends.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
All things considered, this is like a tale by Asimov (one about a mining robot in Mercury IIRC). ...
I can't remember the title offhand, but the fundamental conflict involved trying to get an absolute solution from a problem with varying paramaters. The robot needed to fetch the mercury so as to obey rule 2, to obey human orders. As it approached the mercury, a previously unknown substance was corroding it, thereby partially triggering rule 3, to prevent self-harm, and verging on rule 1, preventing harm to human beings, in that with sufficient corrosion, it would be unable to fetch the mercury for the humans. So it would move towards the mercury until rule 1 overrode rule 2, then move out until rule 2 balanced rule 1, etc. They finally had to break it away by changing its priorities, putting a human in more immediate danger so that the robot had to come to them. It's actually a fairly relevant story for people programming in threaded environments with variable levels of event importance.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Sounds like something out of Angels and Demons to me.
Don't be fooled, that's exactly what the robots want us to believe :)
While I agree with the tenets of your rant, your chosen syntax makes you sound completely insane.