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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
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.
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I didn't know 'radiation' was tangable. I'll have to update the Wikipedia article...
Questions are begged:
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
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.
...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.
Well, you solved it. Good job. Too bad these folks that play with this ultra-radioactive cobalt (the kind that kills you in 30 seconds or less) every day didn't think of that.
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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.
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A centimeter worth of lead would stop most of the lower-energy stuff.
The story is kinda ironic: the irradiated cobalt was intended to test electronics against radiation. So, the robotics lab that lended the robot got a free test-run to verify their radiation tolerance calculations.
Note to would-be evil geniuses: put your bombs in shells made of irradiated cobalt isotopes, it may disable would-be bomb-disposal robots and personnel before they can do anything about it. Radiation labs will get a free test of their security measures and delivery tubes out of the deal.
Damn straight. It's ignoramuses like the anonymous submitter who keep irradiated food off the market when there's no rational reason for it. I could be dining off vacu-packed and irradiated steaks all week on a backcountry hiking trip, but because a bunch of dumbshits don't know the difference between "radiation" and "radioactive" I'm stuck with MREs and freeze dried crap.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"...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.
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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.
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 =)