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I still find it terrifying that even robots couldn’t survive the Chernobyl hot zone.
by hinkley 10mo ago
I still find it terrifying that even robots couldn’t survive the Chernobyl hot zone.
- gambiting 10mo agoThey could, if they were specced correctly. Wasn't the story that they intentionally requested robots hardened against lower radiation level than required to not disclose the true extent of the catastrophe? So the German company that built them underspecced the shielding and so they died quickly.
- echelon 10mo ago> specced Totally orthogonal, but you just reminded me of a pet peeve I have. This word is correct, but I can't stand it. I wish we spelled this "specked", even though that has a homonym. Like trafficked, panicked, frolicking, etc. "specced" makes my brain wince.
- eqvinox 10mo ago> Like trafficked, panicked, frolicking, etc. Those aren't truncations of longer words though? I'd write it as spec'ed but that's German grammar with ' as a truncation mark (signifying the omitted "ifi").
- ninalanyon 10mo agoIt's also normal English usage.
- butvacuum 10mo agoI don't think its good for formal use, but it is common.
- HPsquared 10mo agoMaybe spec'd
- butvacuum 10mo agospecked means to have specks. It is an entirely different word.
- ceejayoz 10mo agoThe real story is a little less dramatic - it got stuck, and that meant it was exposed to the radiation for much longer than planned.
- hinkley 10mo agoThat doesn't quite dovetail with the story I've heard about them shooting the elephant's foot with a gun to spall off a sample. I think there's still some damage control in some of the stories. Which is to say, lies.
- darubedarob 10mo ago[dead]
- PaulHoule 10mo agoElectronics tend to fail at dosages (20 greys or so) similar to what destroys your nervous system.
- pinkmuffinere 10mo agoI'm a non-bio person. Is that a coincidence, or is that because of similarity between our nervous system and electronics?
- PaulHoule 10mo agoI think it's a good rule of thumb. When they send robots into something like the Fukushima site they don't last long. My first take is that I'm not surprised from a fermi problem standpoint that you can destroy two computers made from small parts smashed by radiation with a similar dose. But maybe that intuition is wrong because your brain could survive losing a few neurons but a microchip could be 0% functional after losing one transistor. My rule of thumb is about right for conventional chips but you can certainly get rad-hard chips that hold up better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening Space is a big market for that sort of thing.
- bsder 10mo ago> Is that a coincidence Mostly it's about penetration. Any radiation that can get through your skin can do damage. Once that happens, the question is then how much flux is there doing damage.
- cyberax 10mo agoThey absolutely could, and only one robot got disabled by radiation. The problem was that robots of that era were nearly useless. Why they were useless is interesting in itself. It turned out that controlling robots, when all you have is a bad TV camera, is hard. And robots also tend to get stuck on things. As a result, the "Joker" robot that was helping to clear the roof got its tracks wedged on a firefighters water pipe.