Slashdot Mirror
New Real Life Laser-Rifle Cuts Through Metal Like a Blowtorch
dryriver writes "We've seen real laser guns before pulling off tricks like starting small fires, or popping black balloons. That's cool, sure, but it's got nothing—on this handheld laser rifle. Developed by TWI this laser-cutter was initially designed for use by robots, but a few recent tweaks including a pistol-grip and a trigger made it into a human-sized rifle. It is designed specifically with nuclear decommission in mind, specifically chopping up huge pieces of metal infrastructure into bite-sized bits that are easily disposed of. And while it's definitely suited for that, it has some short-comings compared typical rifles. That range is pretty low, for instance, and it's not exactly mobile."
I'm a trifle surprised that they'd be using some fancy laser apparatus in this situation:
There are aspects of nuclear decommissioning (if memory serves, some lucky sucker got to deal with the 'eh, we don't know what this is, so we'll just weld it into barrels and leave it for the future' supply stored at Hanford, much of which was virulently radioactive, some, which one is always a surprise, also chemically unpleasant and/or explosive) where you can't get away with the heat, open flames, and vaporized-bits-getting everywhere that you see with lasers, various cutting torches, or high powered saws. For that sort of thing, you have somewhat exotic toys like liquid nitrogen cutting jets. If you are allowed to expose the sample to ridiculous temperatures and open flames, though, why expensive lasers rather than boring (and mature and relatively cheap) cutting torches or thermic lances?
Actually, how much power does it need to operate? There must be some energy cost per time unit. But I could not figure it out.