Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
The blockbuster event of Summer 2006: Robot Hero
Starring Ben Affleck as the fucking robot.
you're quite correct... a Co-60 source isn't going to eat through the cicuitry... That's just stupid... It can produce enough heat to melt circuits (assuming it's a very high-fluence source), but the article must've been written by someone ignorant of health physics, since it's quite obvious Co-60 isn't an acid, eating through a container... Finally, these sort of tests were likely done for gamma spectroscopy, where you can use gammas to examine imperfections in materials(it is probably the most common radioactive isotope used in nuclear labs today).
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!
Ohio University has its own reactor which is used for experiments in power generation as well as irradiation of materials. Anyone from nearby colleges can request time with the reactor to irradiate just about anything they want.
To get the material close to the core, pressurized tubes are used. The canisters that hold the material are made of some sort of plastic-like material for the specific purpose of letting radiation pass through. The problem is, repeated exposure causes the material to become brittle and occasionally a canister will break on the return trip (most often, it seems, when it slams into the retrieval portion of the tube and comes to a halt.)
The tubes are necessary to prevent people from coming into close contact with materials that are still radioactive for a time. The person running the experiment only has to load the canister with the material they wish to irradiate, load it in the tube system and send it on its way. The system halts when the tube reaches the core. After some time, the experimenter recalls the canister and can do whatever they please with it, knowing that it will still be emitting small amounts of radiation.
I don't know what the procedure was in the case that a canister failed during transit and material was caught somewhere between source and core. I do know the reactor is not very big (but neat to watch glow in the water) and the radiation danger wasn't too great. I believe it was said that most of the remaining radiation from the material dissipates within 5 minutes of the return. There are tables and shielding boxes with timers on them near the retrieval area.
The point is that radiation can eat through materials. It may not be the best way to phrase what really happens, but materials exposed to radiation react differently. Many materials become brittle. A radiation source as strong as the one in the article (with no mention as to what the cylinder was composed of) could cause any number of problems for anything nearby. The tubes are meant for short exposures as a material passes through, not prolonged exposure of a stuck cylinder.
"...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
We are still producing all the components, including a recently revitalized capability to manufacture the fissile pit (technical term for the uranium or plutonium core). We didn't have that ability for about a decade, but have been able to in small quantities again for a few years.
Bombs were being completely dissassembled and rebuilt throughout, for reliability testing and analysis purposes. In some cases, most or all of the other components were replaced.