In 1997 I was the lead developer of a system originally created for the Department of Energy regarding the best basis inventory of nuclear waste contained in large tanks buried in the ground.
The tanks ranged in size between several hundred thousand gallons to 1 million gallons. Many of the tanks contained large quantities of radioactive waste that had to be constantly monitored due to chemical reactions causing heat in excess of 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
This constant heating and cooling ultimately caused the welds in some of the tanks to fail, resulting in ground, and potentially ground water, contaminations.
Several challenges were brought up for us to work out, the system had to be:
- Easy to use - Scientists weren’t the end users, the end users would consist of management and political leaders.
- Easy to understand
- Low cost
- Be viewable over the Internet
This presented a variety of technology challenges. How do you create an application that is low cost (to the end user), presented over the Internet, that can be compatibly and reliably viewed and operated by virtually anyone?
We chose to use VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) for the interface, which was somewhat difficult to say the least. Everything needed to be as accurately depicted as possible in a true coordinate system. This meant that electronic and hard copy drawing cooridinates using several coordinate systems had to be aggregated and converted to a common format, stored in a database, and then scaled to suitable navigable dimensions losing as little accuracy as possible along the way.
This user interface was set on top of a Cold Fusion backend that tapped into MS SQL Server for the data.
This system proved to be a huge success and was as low cost as you could get to the end user…free. The only caveat was that the end user had to download and install one particular type of free VRML Internet Explorer plug-in to view the 3-D aspects.
This system not only displayed the tanks in three dimensional space, it also showed all the underground and above ground elements like drilled wells, buildings, contamination points from leaks (which were linked to scientific analysis produced by scientists, not us), and even ground strata. The system also allowed users to move through the tank farm in real time resulting in completely flexible views from any perspective. Couple this with the ability to turn on and off all elements, and insert proposed structures (again in real time) and you have an extremely powerful application.
Unfortunately, as is likely to happen with government contracts, budget cuts stopped development of this project and security concerns took it off the Internet. I am currently trying to locate and request clearance to display some static images of the system.
I am happy to report that the concept continued and has evolved to use a modern gaming engine to produce “like-type” systems. The system is no longer useable over the Internet in real time however.
The technology included, and married together in this system included:
- Internet Explorer (HTML, JavaScript, Flash)
- Cosmo Player (VRML Plug in for IE)
- Java (certain client applications, and applets)
- Cold Fusion (Server Side)
- MS SQL Server (Data Storage)
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