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Robots To Clear the Baltic Seafloor of WW-II Mines
An anonymous reader writes "A Russian company is building a massive natural gas pipeline that will run across the Baltic Sea floor. But first, they must clear some of the 150,000 unexploded bombs sitting at the bottom of the sea, left there by the Russian and German armies in the 1940s. About 70 of these mines, each filled with 300 kg of explosive charge, sit in the pipeline's path, mostly in its northern section just south of Finland. And so the company contracted to remove the mines is bringing in robots to do the dirty work. Here's how it will work: A research ship deploys the robot to the seabed, where it identifies the exact location of the explosive. After sounding a warning to surrounding ship traffic, scaring fish away using a small explosive, and then emitting a 'seal screamer' of high intensity noises designed to make the area around the blast quite uncomfortable for marine mammals, Bactec's engineers erupt a 5 kg blast, forcing the mine to detonate. This process ensures the safety of humans plus any animals living in the surrounding environment. The operation concludes with the robot being redeployed to clear up the scrap of the now-destroyed bomb."
Life isn't fair.
Seriously, what else are they going to do? If they try to reclaim the bombs and blow them up at another location, the project just got massively more complex, they are going to still damage the surrounding area when they dig it up and drag it away, the stuff that breaks if one goes off in-place just got a lot more expensive, you have the risk of someone getting hurt or killed during transport, and they've still got to blow it up somewhere. Some life forms are going to be extinguished when the bomb goes off, and no one in their right mind is going to design something to try and keep the bomb from going off. Unexploded ordinance is just nasty stuff that may or may not still be viable - the only effective way to make it safe is to let all the boom out of it.
They try to scare off all the critters they can, then they blow up the mine. It's as cheap, efficient, and about as minimally invasive as such a project could be. That's not to say it's not invasive, only that (short of transporter technology where we can beam it all into space) it's about as good as we're going to get.
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Are you suggesting that the mines not be placed where they are? Very well. I'll call a meeting with Hitler and Stalin and see if we can get this un-done.
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