Funranium Labs

The other half of last week’s fun was responding to a request from UC and Berkeley Police Departments to assist them with some training for their bomb squad unit. While they’re quite familiar with what to do with explosives, they wanted to get some practice in with radioactive sources just to work on potential “dirty bomb” responses. Seeing as how I’m the guy with interesting materials at my disposal and have been The Radiation Guy Who Talks To Cops, I got a call.

 

I set up a nice obstacle course for them to drive the robots through, with some of my favorite sealed sources tucked away out of view behind a whole bunch of waste drums. On the other side of the building, I had the large Cs-137 source put out on the instrument calibration range. Their mission: starting in the middle of the room, head toward the drums and find the sources I’d hidden over there and then drive all the way back to the other end of the room and identify the radioactive source.

Did I mention that over beyond the drums was a somewhat non-descript large cardboard tri-wall box full of uranium/thorium waste? No? Hmm, I failed to mention that to the bomb squads too for some reason.

 

The purpose of test one was a sandbagging exercise to see if I could distract them with shiny, well labeled items to the point that they ignored the very evident higher radiation fields from the cardboard box full of thorium and uranium. The did find my check sources, but when asked them what the dose rate was, they let me know that it was only .3mR/hr but it was a bit higher a bit back. I just kind of stood there quietly while they listened to their own words. They then backed the robot up and went inspecting the box.  When I was asked what the hell was in there, I said that I was pretty sure that they had cameras on that robot that could look for identifying information rather than deploying a dearly precious technician to go read the paperwork.

On the return trip for a look at the large Cs-137 source, I had my technician leave all the transport containers over there, easy to be seen by the camera. The operator homed in on the larger transport container and was rather to disappointed to discover it was empty. I asked him if, like the sealed source, that was the highest field he’d seen. He began searching again and found a lead container that looked suspiciously like it fit inside the larger one.

I had my technician open it up and show the interior to the camera. Empty. The operator grumpily resumes searching.

After five more minutes, he shows me a picture of the calibration stand and says it is somewhere on there. I ask what, specifically, was the source. He opens his mouth, begins to point at the screen, stops, hangs his head and says, “I don’t know. I have no idea what it looks like.”

I gave him a hearty clap on the shoulder and congratulated him on saying the three hardest words in the English language for people in authority. I then had my technician point at the very, very small,unmarked, quite unobtrusive bullet of metal. Radioactive sources don’t necessarily look like anything. Packaging and labeling is what you look for to indicate something is missing or has gone wrong, but the actual source itself may take some finesses with a meter to find. If it is a rather large source, all you’ll really be interested in doing is defining an exclusion area to keep people out of due to high dose rate.

When we were finished with the exercise, I told them all it was about time to pack up their gear. As the officer went to reach for the instrumentation case, I told him, “Uh uh. What do you think you’re doing, officer?”

With some confusion, caught mid-motion of picking up the case, he slowly replied, “Packing…up…our gear?”

I crossed my arms and felt a smirk I remember all too well from the faces of some of my radtech trainers. “Not that way. You have a perfectly good robot to pack all of that with. Reload your cart using the robot.”

The look I got from him will still be treasured when I’m retired and sitting on the porch in my rocking chair. He then nodded and said, “You’re nastier than the FBI was.”

When they finished, I asked the sergeant how often they practiced with these units. His answer: “Not often enough. This has been a serious workout.” I asked if the police, or the City, held picnics or BBQs where they were present. He nodded as if I were a ninny that hadn’t paid attention to the civic calendar ever.

I told him, “Okay, then there is no reason why the Bomb Squad robot isn’t there serving beer and soda to people. I mean, c’mon, it’s a frickin’ robot, guys! This is a goodwill goldmine in a way that a K-9 unit never will be. It is a chance for you to practice while impressing the bejeezus out of kids. Also, make sure to check if your manipulator arm will crush a beer bottle first. Important safety tip.”

As we were loading everything back into the truck I gave them my take home message, which is very similar to that I’ve been giving for Fukushima reactor problems: never forget the latency of what you’re working with. The explosive will always take priority over the radioactive material as the kaboom will kill you dead immediately. I can always decontaminate things and people later; it may not be quick, it definitely won’t be cheap, but cleaning up rad is what people like me are for. What I can’t do is unexplode people, which is why we have a Bomb Squad.

 

So, if you’re at some future Berkeley civic function where beverages might be served, look out for your friendly robo-server and say hello to the guys driving it. They’re fun guys doing a tricky job, though a bit PR-impaired, bless their hearts.

There’s nothing quite like the end of the month, which is always paperwork crunch time, for new and interesting opportunities to crop up. Despite knowing the certain long hours they will demand in make up time, you just can’t…say…no. Two of those happened this week, I got to enter into UC Berkeley’s Lawson Adit (definition: an adit is the entrance to nearly horizontal mine) and I got to give a crash course in radiation detection using bomb squad robots to the local police departments (this part of the adventure may be found in Part 2).

First, the questions everyone asks: why does UC Berkeley have a mine and how long has it been there?

Before UC Berkeley had a Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, it was known as the School of Mines and operated out of what is now known as Hearst Memorial Mining Building. Created by a grant by Pheobe Hearst in 1902 from the vast wealth her husband George had realized during the various gold and silver strikes during the late 1800s, Pheobe Hearst wanted to try to educate a new generation of competent mining engineers in George’s memory to work all the vermiculated placer bearing lands of the American West, rather than drag them over from the east coast or depend upon finding them among the flood of immigrants from Europe.

In 1918, it was decided that they’d have students dig & blast a mine in the hard rock of the hills behind the Hearst Memorial Mining Building. The result was the Lawson Adit. Upon discovery of the Hayward Fault running through there, they decided to dig that mine juuuuuust a little bit deeper so that they could actually cross the fault. You know, because it was there…in the name of Science…for More Awesome. Also, it had a special side gallery that was just for storing the student dynamite. Education used to be much more hands on and exciting once upon a time.

By the late 1950s, the excitement for mining had died down and having a mine bisected by an active (and often creeping) fault seemed a Bad Idea. There were numerous collapses in the adit, primarily where the fault crossed, that made the mine too dangerous to work with anymore. The decision was made to seal it up and then, several years later, seal it up much more thoroughly to prevent the homeless from camping in it and frat boys from getting up to shenanigans.

My entry was done in the interest of making sure that no one had done anything silly and tried to store/discard radioactive materials down there. It was unlikely, but I have made a career for myself in having a very dim view of the common sense and forward thinking of others and I thought it prudent to check, just in case. The first thing you see on entry into the adit is a giant goddamn spike hanging down from the ceiling, as shown in the picture to the right.

No, I don’t know why it was put there but it is definitely very educational. Unless you’re shorter than 4 foot tall, you probably only get to learn the “Wear A Hardhat In A Mine” lesson once from this spike.

Rockfalls litter the floor and have dammed up the trickling groundwater, so it is a soggy stroll in the tunnel. Roots hang down from above, with that awful hairy appearance they have for sucking water from dank, moist air. Of course, where you have groundwater seeping through limestone, you get cave formations. This may be a man-made cave, but the natural processes are still going, trying to make some new stalactites on the concrete reinforcing of the side cut entry.

At the end of the tunnel, is the collapse that indicates where the Hayward Fault crosses. Lest a rather large hunk of limestone drop and make My Lovely Assistant get very upset with my corpse, I didn’t actually scramble over the debris pile to poke the fault fracture proper.

With the tunnel cleared for radioactive materials and nothing found,  they can now do installation of new seismographs before they lock it down good and tight for the foreseeable future.

Next time: Herr Direktor Funranium puts the UC and Berkeley PD bomb squads, and their robots, through their paces.

In addition to being South Pole Station’s bartender, my actual job (the reason I was sent to the bottom of the Earth) was as the science/cryogenics technician. It was my job to take care of all the liquid helium and liquid nitrogen and make sure all the cryogenic equipment on the telescopes stayed in good repair.

At the second major party of the summer, the disco party, I was the bartending as the construction worker from the Village People because I had flannel shirt and hard hat available to me, which is the only visual cue needed for construction work it seems. My boss’ boss, one of the people who originally interviewed me, was down for a few weeks during the summer and decided to attend the party. He’d already had a couple drinks before showing up and was surprised to see me there. He asked me to make something special. So, I mixed up a vodka with a little bit of dry vermouth and put it on the counter in a clear plastic cup.

As he reached for it, I batted his hand away. “You asked for something special”, I said.

I then reached under the bar for the 10L transport dewar of liquid nitrogen (LN2) and poured a little bit into his cup. He jumped back as the boiling fog came out of the cup’s top and covered the bar as the -170C LN2 hit the room temperature martini. After a couple minutes, and more batting away of his hand as he tried to grab it too early, it had calmed down and there was just thin layer of fog in the cup covering the drink. I picked the rather cold cup up, blew the fog off, and handed it to him.

He looked down into the cup at a strange crusty solid something floating in his drink. With some disgust he asked, “What the hell is that?”

I reached in the drink, pulled it out and threw it on the floor behind me. “That was all the useless water that used to be in your drink, diluting your martini”, I replied.

His eyes went a bit wide at that and he took a sip. He pounded the bar for a few seconds as his martini was now about 150 proof rather than the ~70 normal ones are. He then ran out the door abandoning his drink.

Ten minutes later, he returned with the eight visiting Swedish researchers in tow, almost like the schoolgirls from Madeline. He shoved them all up to the bar and exclaimed, “I want you to make for them what you made for me and don’t skimp on the LN2. Sven…I hired this guy.”

I made some very happy Swedes that night and gave my boss’ boss a hangover he shook his head in memory at for the rest of the summer.