Estonians will use advanced technology to rebuild Ukraine.
The Estonian company GScan has become one of the few companies in the world to develop portable muon tomography devices. In Ukraine, the company plans to use this technology to assess hidden damage to buildings and bridges that could lead to future destruction. The company has already successfully tested the equipment at the British nuclear facility Sellafield.
Muons are born from the collision of high-energy cosmic ray protons with atomic nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere. These particles exist for only 2 microseconds, after which they decay into electrons and antineutrinos. Moving at the speed of light, they penetrate hundreds of meters deep into the earth. Every second, approximately 10,000 muons fall on each square meter of the Earth’s surface.
As early as the 1940s, scientists proposed using muon detectors to investigate large impenetrable structures. In the 1970s, the first experiment took place — the search for hidden cameras in the Egyptian pyramid. It took 50 years for the technology to reach the proper level of development.
«No other technology can currently look inside a concrete block», — explains GScan co-founder Andi Hektor. According to him, the most powerful X-ray systems penetrate only 10-20 centimeters, while «muon detectors can see» tens of meters deep.
The system works thanks to special sensors made of plastic fiber, which are arranged in layers. The first detector captures the muon trajectory before it enters the structure, and the second detector captures it after it leaves it. By analyzing the changes in the path of hundreds of thousands of particles, the system creates a detailed map of the internal structure of the object.
The technology can detect corrosion of metal elements, invisible cracks and cavities with liquid. Unlike X-rays, muons are naturally present in the environment and do not damage cells or DNA, so operators do not have a risk of developing cancer.
To inspect a potentially hazardous structure, such as a damaged bridge, the detectors scan every key point over the course of a week. A complete survey of an average highway bridge takes a month and costs approximately $125,000.
The company is in talks with the Ukrainian authorities to test the technology on Kyiv’s Paton Bridge, a 70-year-old, 1,543-meter-long structure that has been a concern since before the war.
GScan has been developing the technology since 2016. Last year, the company successfully investigated mothballed nuclear reactors at the submarine training center in Paldiski, Estonia. Using muon scattering analysis, the researchers looked for accumulations of radioactive waste and assessed the condition of the reactors, which have been buried under layers of concrete since the 1990s.
Source: Space
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