h a l f b a k e r yFlaky rehab
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very simple.
robot with a sniffing geiger counter and a radiation 'mouth' find highly radioactive particles after a terrorist blast of a dirty bomb, or nuclear bomb, ...it 'eats' the particles and then powers itself off the radiation. the robot itself becomes quite radioactive , but still can be
designed with a small shielding that is not to heavy to keep IN the most vicious radiation.
or, if you wanna get creative. build into the robot a capacity for reproduction like a von neumann machine. presto,, radiation problem solved.
z
Betavoltaics
http://peswiki.com/...erPedia:BetaVoltaic
If you're in for the long haul, and the skies are darkened... [loonquawl, May 11 2009]
[link]
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Once a partical radiates for the most part they are done. Right? The particals with the long chains of reaction after reaction are the ones in the initial blast. I'm not exactly an expert so that is where I would research next. |
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I think Mr. Kirsh is talking about small dust-type particles,
not individual atoms. So, there's nothing inherently wrong
with this apart from its unfeasibility. |
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I'm going to build this some day, but I will need something radioactive.. |
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I suspect if it was possible to build such a device then someone would already have built it. There's a lot of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and if it could all be used as nuclear fuel then effectively there would be no radioactive waste and governments would jump on it. |
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Do they have people with vacuum cleaners at
nuclear power plants ? |
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[marked-for-tagline]: //there's nothing inherently wrong with this apart from its unfeasibility// |
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Betavoltaics seem the most energy-efficient way to make electrical energy from nuclear decay, there, a tritium battery is listed as having 24Watts/kg [link], for about 10 years. With such low power at disposal, the robot would take quite some time doing anything, but then, in a landscape riddled with enough radioactive particles to power the robot, nobody would be rushing it, either. |
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Can you power a robot effectively with gamma emitters? |
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It would be easier to use the radiant energy imparted by environmental particles than to capture the particles. That is, with a moderate sized robot in a post-apocalyptic scenario with lots of nonradioactive substrate - maybe some giant robot could just inhale the particles. |
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But if the environment was very radioactive the robot could do this betavoltaic trick using ambient radiation, and so use the energy from the particles it has not yet captured. Maybe if the energy capture device had some directional attributes it would help home in on these uncollected particles. |
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You could build your prototype to use the power emitted from an old radium watch dial. I am not sure where else one might legally and easily obtain beta emitters. |
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