They tied a string to a ferret and got an atomic age pipe cleaner.
The ferret cost $35 and is 15 inches long. She helps clean the 300-foot pipes in the Meson Laboratory building now under construction at the $250 million National Accelerator Laboratory at Batavia.
I wonder if the ferret pulled a brush of some sort, or if it was narrow enough that his/her fur is the cleaning material?
“A specially-made collar placed around Felicia’s neck carries a string which she pulls through the pipe. To the end of this string workmen fasten an appropriate swab which is then pulled through the pipe by the workmen. After that the vacuum pipe is clean and free of unwanted scrap particles.”
Is a particle accelerator on off kind of thing or can radioactive particles get stuck or be created in the linings
I’m only a physics enthusiast, so I may be off on specifics, but yeah it should be on/off. These things aren’t dealing with large particles as far as atoms go - you’re looking at more like protons, electrons, etc. After the collision particles will typically decay very quickly, so you’ll get all kinds of radiation, but the products of the decay are very short lived. You will sometimes have unstable isotopes created in the walls of the collider, but they’re designed to be very safe and avoid that. And even if there was no thought given to the wellbeing of the ferret, humans work on and in colliders, so they need to be safe - not to mention how radioactivity could potentially throw off results.
