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.)
And they were there because the energy use of the MRI made them suspect it was a pot farm… in a legal state.
The icing on the cake: „After retrieving his rifle, the officer is said to have accidentally left a magazine full of bullets on the floor of the MRI room.“
Next to the clown shoes, squeaky red nose, and rainbow afro wig, I assume. Unreal.
Yeah, and the magnet was not to blame for this incident despite how the title of this article reads. Given all the (alleged, I guess) facts of the case, I’m pretty sure sure the cops showed up in a clown car that played Yackety Sax when the horn was pressed.
IIRC the emergency stop vents the liquid helium, that’s a lot of the cost I imagine.
The biggest problem is that the magnets will “quench”, which is what happens when a superconducting electromagnet suddenly stops being superconducting.
There’s a lot of energy stored in that magnet, and when it quenches the energy all turns to heat in a very short time. Any remaining helium will flash boil, turning into an explosive expansion of gas, and the thermal shock will seriously damage the machine
Which, in older machines, might happily pump a fuckton of gaseous helium into the room, potentially creating overpressure and squeezing the door shut while people suffocate.
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.
My uncle is a medical equipment installer that installs and calibrates MRI machines.
The issue is more than just the physical damage, which can be expensive, these machines take a long time to calibrate to the local environment. If the electromagnets are damaged, the whole set needs to be replaced, as they are manufactured in matching batches.
It’s like if you damage a piston in an engine, it will cause damage to the crank shaft, which will also damage the rest of the engine. It’s a helluva job to fix.
I don’t suppose your uncle knows what happens to those magnets that come out…?
You know. Asking for a “friend”. (Okay so this hypothetical friend maybe likes to play with magnets in a totally harmless way….)(edit, yes I know how dangerous they are…. I’ll make sure my “friend” is careful….)
🤣
Just make sure to tell your friend that 600amp wires are expensive and THICK.
Promises promises….
(In the immortal words of some fire-performer-dude at RenFair, “don’t do it at home. Do it at Grandma’s!”)
The primary magnets will be super conducting magnets. Unless you have liquid helium (or liquid nitrogen, if your lucky) to cool it, it will just be an interesting rock.
There’s a facility a few miles from me that makes the LN. used to work at a facility that had a tank farm served by them. Their driver liked to smoke while purging the liquid hydrogen tanks.
And not like, walked over to the smoke shack, nope. right there next to the exhaust vent.
All the helium offgassed instead of being reclaimed so…
Can we just stop prosecuting people for having weed, which is a harmless plant.
Especially since it’s legal in California. Like, c’mon guys, what the hell are y’all doin’?! What’s Michael Jordan saying “Just stop it” when you need him.
Two thousand liters of helium gas were allegedly released as a result of the rifle striking the machine.
No not really. It was release as a result of the same idiot who brought his rifle into the room later pressing the emergency shutdown, thereby quenching the magnet and dumping the helium. What a dumb fuck.
The judge that signed off on this warrant needs to be held accountable. Tinted office windows and some guy saying he smelled something should not be enough for a warrant.
Lose your rifle, lose your job. Simple as.
Zero tolerance is never good. But this example of stupidity should have at least lose the officer his gun privilege and relegate him to a desk job.
Are you saying you have zero tolerance for zero tolerance?
LoL… intolerant of intolerance… but yeah.
Life is messy and hardly ever black or white. Zero tolerance is just lazy leadership.
I can think of a few things that are appropriate to have zero tolerance for, and I would also agree getting to that point is the result of bad leadership.
Sounds like this guy was stupid and is quite lucky no one was harmed. (If the magnets manipulated the gun in a certain way, it’s possible for it to have misfired.)(on second thought people were harmed by the loss of the MRI.)
If you fired a gun past an MRI machine, could it conceivably catch the bullets? I am currently assuming that significant deflection is absolutely possible with such a powerful magnet.
Bullets are seldom made of iron though; they’re usually lead sometimes jacketed with copper, so they’re not magnetic. Conductive, but not magnetic.
Traveling through that strong of a magnetic field, that would definitely generate eddy currents. Like dropping a magnet down a brass plate causes it to move very slowly because the magnetic field moving induces current in the plate and the current creates a counter magnetic field. My instinct is that it would just slow it down, But that MRI is spinning magnets. Maybe it just slows down a little and is it noticeable, maybe it spins it while it’s slowing it down and amplifies the minute drop due to gravity. Too bad MythBusters are gone. There’s not many people out there funded well enough to test shooting bullets through an MRI machine.
Wait if the bullet is generating Eddy current can we get electric bullets by shooting bullets through an MRI like shooting an arrow through fire to get a flaming arrow.
The bullet would not be generating an eddy current.
The eddy currents are induced in the bullet by the magnetic fields as it passes through.
It’s like a generator’s coil that doesn’t have anything attached to it. Because there’s nowhere for it to go, the eddy currents just dissipate when it leaves the magnetic field.
What if I filled the room with lightning?
It would be super cool
Sounds like a MRI machine could work as some decent home defense.
Rod Farva level of stupid.
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