Thermometer in my butt. Is my Cobalt-60 still fresh. Does an old X-Ray machine make a good weapon?

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Dave you had me scared! I thought you meant a "time/place" thing! It would be interesting to see your friends deal. Which brings us to MRI machines. I only had one test done (out of too many) when the operation tech knew anything about the machine. I have gotten most of my questions answered except how does the coolant stay cool? Is there a condensor somewhere? Ive spent so much time in one that I can tell when the coolent "pump" starts doing it's thing. Also, how much power does one of these use? My thought would be a lot. Yet I've never noticed a draw down while sitting in lobby or stuck in the hole.
 
Cad, I already was up on that. From what I have learned MRI's are pretty safe. Unless you are of "hardy Russian" peasant stock. My first MRI the tech who weighed about 12 pounds says "ive never had one stuck before!" Of course I had no idea what to expect, so cramed into this tube all was well until the test started. Jesus! maybe it would have been a good idea to let me know what to expect. Them to make it worse I had to have one that required my head to be locked into a cage like deal (might have been sexual in a different time) and I literally could feel/hear the radio/mag waves in the center of my skull.
 
Dave:
The industrial X-Ray machine I saw was one at the South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City,South Dakota.It was donated to the school by the Hills Material Company-they used it to X-Ray concrete core samples-was a small machine.Built by GE.It ran from single phase 240V.I didn't see it in operation.Was in the Geology lab there.Don't know if they still have the machine.I encountered it probably about 35 yrs ago!A freind of mine worked there-My Dad worked at that school,too.
I was in an MRI machine after a car accident-funky experience.I was groggy at the time-just remember the X-Ray scanner head rotating around my head.
 
Never trust your life to firmware. If you can help it, which isn't always. As owners of computer cars would quickly agree. Or several hundred passengers of Airbus (Scarebus) commercial aircraft, if they were still alive. Or a half dozen passengers of Schindler elevators.

A stubborn bug in Schindler firmware allowed the elevator car door to open while the elevator was in motion. The wiki below (I believe) is incomplete. I stumbled across this (and the expanded list as I recall but can't find it now) researching the demise of Westinghouse. Schindler bought the elevator division.

The clunky old Otis hydraulic in this building can open the hall doors while the car floor is above or below the building floor by up to 6 inches. Not that that would kill you, but could dump you flat on your face if you weren't paying attention.

 
I really don't know how much power in amps that an MRI machine uses, but I remember seeing the circuit breaker for it when I had mine done. It looked like the main disconnect for half my house (150A), so it was probably a 150 or 200 amp circuit.

Lights wouldn't be likely to dim as the MRI (in a hospital anyway) would be fed from totally different distribution panelboards, and probably different transformer banks, than the lighting circuits.
 
Industrial Xray

The one my friend operated was designed to penetrate iron or stainless steel castings up to 8 or 10 feet thick, to find flaws - cracks or blowholes, so that these could be bored into and filled with weld metal, before being re-Xrayed. Typical castings being Hydroelectric valvegear, etc.......

All best,

Dave T
 
I used to work in a building at NASA-MSFC where some of the International Space Station modules were built. From time to time they'd need to do "field x-raying" on things that were too large to go into the machine. Whenever they did this, they scheduled it for after hours, and the entire rest of the building had to be evacuated. Before they started, security would do a sweep of the building, and if you were still in your office, they made you leave. They also cordoned off a road that ran in front of the building when they were doing this.
 
I never got to watch it, but I saw the setup a couple of times. They had a shielded room in the basement that they controlled it from. For some things they had a robotic mechanism that could do stuff like scan over a weld, but for others it was a process of set up a shot, run to the control room, take the shot, run back to the assembly hall and set up for the next shot, etc.

There were some really cool things in that part of the center. Next door to that building was a thing called the X-Ray Calibration Facility. It had a huge vacuum chamber that had a tunnel about four feet in diameter coming out of one side. The tunnel went out through the side of the building and extended on stilts outside to another building about 1/4 mile away. The second building was the "source" building where an X-ray or gamma ray source was set up at the far end of the tunnel. This allowed them to simulate X-ray or gamma ray sources in space, for testing spacecraft sensors (e.g., the Chandra X-ray telescope). The whole tunnel was pumped down to a very high vacuum and kept cold with liquid nitrogen. There was a road that ran alongside the tunnel that I used to walk at lunch. Every few hundred feet there was a liquid-nitrogen-powered cryopump and all kinds of plumbing and venting equipment. For some of the tests they did with it, they went through two tanker trucks of liquid nitrogen a day.
 

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