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Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

I did a sort of internship at Los Alamos which involved building some drones. A year or two later I got a call from my advisor there, out of the blue asking me if I had anything immediately available that could do recon underground effectively. I didn't really, so I declined. I asked what they needed it for and he said it would be easier if I got the info from the news. That was kinda terrifying ... turned out to be this incident.

Internship started as this thing: https://youtu.be/hq03MsP1MPI?si=lVpDMLqRN4nfwMiA really great experience.

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I went to school in New Mexico and had really mixed feelings about the culture around Los Alamos and Sandia.

There are a lot of brilliant people there both in terms of science and project management. However, the best person I knew got driven out. But I think also a lot of nepotism and a security clearance culture that filters out really interesting people and leaves behind the dangerously milquetoast.

Me too, phd at NM Tech. Loved being in Socorro. You?

Undergrad, Physics, class of '92. Did physics PhD at Cornell and wound up working as a software dev in the social science department!

Thesis topics? (either of you all)

I still find it terrifying that even robots couldn’t survive the Chernobyl hot zone.

They 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.

> 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.

> 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").

It's also normal English usage.

I don't think its good for formal use, but it is common.

Maybe spec'd

specked means to have specks. It is an entirely different word.

The real story is a little less dramatic - it got stuck, and that meant it was exposed to the radiation for much longer than planned.

That 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.

Electronics tend to fail at dosages (20 greys or so) similar to what destroys your nervous system.

I'm a non-bio person. Is that a coincidence, or is that because of similarity between our nervous system and electronics?

I 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

Space is a big market for that sort of thing.

> 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.

They 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.

you have a "si" tracking parameter in the youtube link

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