I read a lengthy piece about this somewhere. Can’t remember the source now. Featured many pictures of the storage pools and sealed buildings.
We were chatting with them yesterday about a new sem. They need the eds detector to go all the way up to Americium and Curium. It should do, but I don’t believe anybody has tested up that sort of area before.
Never had to use that bit of me periodic table before.
High-energy radiation, particularly gamma, can penetrate substantial thicknesses of solid material. The experiment I used to be responsible for had two foot thick concrete shield walls. As the radiation is absorbed it deposits its energy along its tracks, disrupting the crystal structure of whatever it’s passing through. If you’ve got a complicated semiconductor chip then it’s very vulnerable to that damage.
There might well be an argument for considering valves rather than solid-state devices in that environment (although radiation-induced noise might be an issue). This is a different situation from the one that led Russian military aircraft designers to fit valves into some of their avionic systems - in that case they were worried about the huge electromagnetic pulse generated when a nuclear weapon lets go.
2 Likes
The storage ponds get are focussed on quite a bit. Especially the cracks in them. Some of the other storage places suffer from a build up in hydrogen. Wouldn’t want a bad thing to happen to that bit.
1 Like
In the dramatisation of Chernobyl a helicopter flies above the exposed mess & it is brought down, the implication being that the radiation stopped it functioning. I wasn’t sure if that was true & whether it’d have been mechanical or electronic systems that would fail (or both at once).
Most of them (maybe all) are double-skinned with an air gap between the inner and outer concrete skins and the inner one supported on props between it and the outer. The guy I was talking to was part of the team that had the contract for, once a year, crawling into that narrow space between the two skins and monitoring for leaks in the inner one and for any degradation of the props. When I used to think my job was getting me down I would stop and spend half a minute thinking about his job.
5 Likes
and the robot they used on the roof, the ruskies told the Germans the readings/levels were much lower than they were and it crapped out.
1 Like
Shit. That sounds like a bloody horrible job!
Electronics are far-and-away the most vulnerable. They do worry about mechanical stuff occasionally, particularly radiation embrittlement. It’s another stonking problem with fusion reactor design. I once went to a talk where the guy was envisioning a lifetime for the whole huge reaction chamber assembly of 18 months ! The plan was to mount it on something like railway bogeys and wheel an old one out and a new one in every year and a half. The old ones would be stored at the back of the building to cool off.
1 Like
A sobering and interesting read. Wow!
good old english understatement there?
This is a good article on the robots:
When I saw them, some are still hot and I didn’t hang around with them too long
1 Like
If you make the kit out of the right elements then the neutrons will ‘activate’ it but the isotopes made will be short-lived. This means you only have to look after the thing for a short while (Good News). But short-lived isotopes spit out radiation at a huge rate while they’re decaying - that’s why they’re short-lived. Radiation coming out at a huge rate is Bad News. Distance (between you and it) and shielding and spending as little time as possible anywhere nearby are your friends here. Think ‘volunteers’ shoveling debris off the Chernobyl roof.
A greetings of mine did the side scan sonar survey of those ponds to produce an accurate digital map of the contents. Stuff was just dumped in there, a lot of it has collapsed and looks like what can best be described as a pile of collapsed scaffolding. Going to be a fucking nightmare to sort out.
That scene in the drama was a bit of artistic licence. Sadly the pilot just flew too close to a crane cable and the rotors hit. There is a video of the incident up on youtube.
1 Like
'quarium sort of broke.
Oh shit, I’ve sat boozing it up under that many times.
1 Like
That is a lot of dead guppies.
The whole hotel is basically a giant atrium built around that tank.
There is, or at least was, a circular bar around the base. And the stuff in the tank was mostly a lot bigger than guppies.
That’s a real shame.
1,000 tonnes of anything falling from an average height of 7m is going to make a helluva mess.