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.

Comments

Radiation - Seems to be a recurring problem.

[Ruff_ilb]

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.

Not to be picky

[lifebouy]

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.