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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...
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
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
...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.
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.
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).
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
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
Irradiation doesn't make things radioactive. Exposure to a neutron flux can cause materials to become activated, but unless you've got a nuclear reactor around this isn't likely to be a problem.
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions
ultrasonic modem, the sound waves pass through the shielding and back to the base, or to an ultrasonic microphone and emitter pair on a long wire, since those components would be less sensative than digital circuits
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Cobalt-60 emits gamma radiation, which is comprised of high-energy photons. Photons only react with electrons, not nuclei, so if element X is exposed to them, it will still be element X afterwards, with its atomic number and mass unchanged.
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"
Our local county bomb disposal team has a robot and they only use fibre for remote control to avoid having any EM radiation (even from electrical signaling on copper) triggering the device being handled. I can't believe a small county in Utah is bleeding edge with their robot!
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.
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
"...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
You may not realise, but "salt cellar" (also: "saltcellar") is a perfectly appropriate term for a salt shaker.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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
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 =)