this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
418 points (96.9% liked)
Not The Onion
12314 readers
153 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's better than the title implies. They also broke the MRI machine because they hit emergency stop buttons instead of stopping for a couple seconds to ask how to safely handle removing the gun.
(I'm not sure the cost difference between a graceful shutdown and an e-stop and can't find information, but if it's 250k worth of fix, I'm betting it's significant.)
IIRC the emergency stop vents the liquid helium, that's a lot of the cost I imagine.
Yeah. The magnet quench flash boils a bunch of helium which is itself expensive, and presents a nice asphyxiation hazard as well. And then, assuming the quench damaged nothing, you have to set up the magnet again by getting the coils back down to superconducting temperatures... to get there, you end up boiling off a lot more helium. And then you have have to bring an engineer in to get the electrons spinning through the coil again and wait for the wobbles in the current to stabilize.
Or so I think. I work with NMR spectrometers and not MRIs, but it's essentially the same technology.
There's also a finite supply of helium/liquid helium and ...it ain't cheap to refill.