The inside of Fukushima ’s three busted nuclear reactor coresare a big wad . It ’s basically just hundred of tons of very , very , very radioactive materials like U , plutonium , and Cs . proletarian want to clean it up , but they have a problem . It ’s so dangerous , they ca n’t glance inside , much less go inside .
Do n’t worry . engineering science ’s coming to the rescue in the form of plentiful speck named muon and some obscure laws of physics . Because the sword and concrete wall of the reactor are several metrical foot duncical , traditional imaging technology like X - rays wo n’t work out .
negative muon will , though . They ’re subatomic particles that are about 200 times heavier than negatron . Muons are constantly rain down on Earth — and even passing through Earth itself — because they ’re shaken loose from speck in the standard atmosphere by cosmic irradiation . How in the heck do the heck do these midget things help us see inside impossible place ? We just have to view how they move .
The Los Alamos National Laboratory and Toshiba are putting the finishing contact on a muon - power imagination gadget that they believe will let them see deeply inside the reactors without putting any doer in peril or risking further actinotherapy leaks . The technology basically blemish mu-meson when they go in one side of the nuclear reactor and checks to see if they bumped into any speck inside and were divert on the mode through . Over fourth dimension , this will assist them map out the inside of the reactor .
It sounds a lilliputian confusing , but remember , this is some obscure physics here . The New York Timesdescribes the gadget itselfpretty understandably :
The accompanying setup , which has already been tried out on a small , intact reactor , consists of two billboard - size detectors , fix up on diametrical sides of the building . Each detector is like an array of pipes in a church service organ , with each pipage fill with torpid gas , including Ar , that give an reading when a negative muon hit . The detectors keep track of which pipes were hit on the way in and on the way out , and at what slant .
alike technology is presently used to check shipping containers for radioactive material when they enter the U.S. So - called muon tomography was also used to rake the insides of the Great Pyramids in Egypt back in the 1960s . Whether or not it will be Fukushima ’s saving seemliness rest to be get wind . It ’s certainly near than the choice because there are none that do n’t include certain death .
Now if only they could get that ice wallto frost … [ NYT ]
https://gizmodo.com/fukushimas-giant-ice-wall-cant-get-cold-enough-to-freez-1591881083
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