All Steel Emits Radiation - Can it Kill You? FutureIQ

953 views Wait, is this logic right? • Nov 25, 2023

Slog Reference: Contaminated steel

Description

Most of the steel in use these days is contaminated by nuclear radiation. Why and when this happened is an interesting tale. Let's talk about the effects of nuclear weapons testing after the second world war on our daily lives. How the steel we use these days is contaminated, and what does it mean for you?

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Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

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Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Links mentioned in the video:
Navin's Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/NGKabra/status/1369149067830259716

#futureiq #radioactivity

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Transcript

- did you know that because of all the nuclear tests we have done the bombs we exploded in the 1940s 50s and 60s all the steel produced in the world after that is contaminated by nuclear radiation as a result of this all Steel in the world is divided into two types of Steel pre 1945 steel which is called non-contaminated steel and post 1945 steel which is contaminated steel and today's episode we will talk about what this has to do with sunken battleships and the search for dark matter in the [Music] universe how do you manage to find topics that are so wide and apart from each other like sunken battleships dark matter what connection this is called

0m 55s the principle of Maximum surprise okay so may I work hard on that okay all right anyway so uh what happened when the nuclear bomb was invented uh us Russia and a whole bunch of other countries got into an arms race to build a lot of nuclear bombs and as part of building better and bigger and more fancy bombs they had to test the bombs right to test the bombs they would explode them explode the bombs as a side effect of course we all know this right that uh uh radiation is let out into the atmosphere and it spreads I mean it happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki it happened in Chernobyl uh where some of the radiation is still there and like

1m 42s monster pigs exist in those forests now um all kinds of stuff right watch the series watch the series it's fun well not fun fun but fun but as a result uh one of the things that happened was a radioactive uh variation of cobalt called Cobalt 60 uh as opposed to cobalt 59 which is the normal Cobalt right radioactive Cobalt was dispersed into the atmosphere exactly was dispersed in the atmosphere and now Cobalt 60 was there everywhere all over the world okay okay now when uh you make steel right what is steel steel is basically Ion with a small amount of contamination of carbon dioxide in it right uh so to make steel you have to

2m 33s pass atmospheric carbon dioxide over the ion and the problem is that this carbon dioxide contamination has a contamination of its own yeah which is the Cobalt 60 and so now all steel that is created uh contains a small amount of Cobalt 60 okay all right okay why does this matter I was about to ask you that so big deal there is a bit of cobalt 16 in our stainless steel how does that affect anything so uh when you have to make sensitive instruments that uh need to measure uh radiation huh and if those instruments contain steel then the Cobalt 16 the steel interferes with the measurement can you tell me why do I have instruments to

3m 23s measure radiation Geer counter I mean if I'm going to Chernobyl I need to know exactly what amount of radiation I'm going to take Akash when was the last time you went to Chernobyl and did you carry a gerer counter with you yesterday we went to chernobil why did you forget man nobody's going to chernobil Okay g counter is like a lab thing tell me something more uh I honestly don't know where would we want to measure radiation medical devices right you want to see if somebody has been exposed to radiation and whether they need uh medication but uh another one is that when you are building big astronomic radio telescopes true and you are measuring uh the particles that are

4m 12s being sent Across the Universe right so cosmic rays are coming in and they are coming from very far away which means that the number of particles that reach the Earth is really really tiny it is and the instruments we build to measure those right are insanely sensitive yeah and they are the ones used to measure Dark Matter except that this insanely sensitive instrument keeps getting bombarded by Cobalt 60 uh in the instrument itself to build these sensitive instruments what you need is steel which doesn't have this Cobalt 60 non-contaminated steel so that you house this instrument uh uh in a safe chamber like this this and there is no interference correct but now we figured

5m 03s out the dark matter and looking into space and all of that where do sunken battleships come into the picture okay so where do you get non-contaminated steel oh right yeah go on because what has happened is that all the battleships before World War II right they contained a lot of Steel yeah right and they sunk and they below underwater and they're protected from everything and they are clean steel without any cobal 60 in them non-contaminated steel right so to build our uh our instrument sensitive instruments you have to go diving to the bottom of the ocean and bring up these pieces of Steel uh for all your non-contaminated steel needs what a fascinating thought to look into the sky

5m 58s we have to dive deep into the Earth First yes very philosophical thought but uh it's an interesting thing how one event or one invention or one Discovery whichever you want to call it has changed the world in so many ways has changed the way we approach things in so many ways just radioactivity impacting day-to-day life in this manner is something that you don't really think about well one event can change everything right one invention so the Next Generation AIS that are being invented these days gpt3 and chat G PT they are going to contaminate all our text right after 2022 all the text in the world is going to be divided into pre 2022 text which

6m 42s was written by humans yeah and post 2022 text which nobody knows which parts are written by humans and which parts are written by chat GPT it's just the same concept this came from uh Twitter user tube light yeah this by the way is pre 2022 completely written and formulated by humans there was no AI used in in forming any of these sentences these are time stamp 2022 we'll put a time stamp there you go yeah right yeah all right but that brings up other interesting questions like um has radioactivity impacted anything else or just the steal radioactivity of course impacts anything it is at a large dose but this this tiny dose of radio ity it even impacts

7m 31s photographic plates so when nuclear bombs were tested Kodak used to find out first because their photographic plates would get uh damaged and uh then later on I think the governments uh started secretly informing them beforehand because I think Kodak tried to sue us or something like that we we'll actually look that up and put that uh in the description in the show notes for you to check out but yeah this is fascinating does this mean that the steel we use on a day-to-day life is radioactive well yes but not in the way you think right I mean one of the reactions a lot of people have when I tell them this story uh is that oh my

8m 20s God so now all the steel is contaminated and I am eating it and I'm going to get cancer and no the amount of radioactive stuff uh in the steel is so low that it doesn't make any difference to us on our day-to-day life it only affects these extremely extra extra sensitive instruments nothing else so that's not something to worry about so naen has actually done a thread on Twitter on this topic and we'll put a link to that in the show notes and description do check that out and in that thread in fact there are multiple amazing comments and multiple questions that have come up some of which we will try to address now and in fact we are creating a WhatsApp

8m 58s group in which we will be collecting these questions like these on topics that we are going to make videos on so if you want to be a part of that WhatsApp group we'll tell you how to do that at the end of this video I just wanted to put it out there but the point I'm trying to uh bring forth is in in the thread that Naina has made this user called cool one that's the handle at cool one has uh had the best take on the topic he says or she or whoever it is they say that uh my stainless steel is now stained with nuclear explosions and I love the pun so well done cool one um

9m 34s another interesting tweet is a question from uh this person called pradep and this is what we are offering uh people in the WhatsApp group that if you join the WhatsApp group you will be able to ask questions in advance which we will then tackle in the video like we are doing in this video with the uh question from the Twitter thread that na has already posted that's not the WhatsApp group so Pradip asks are we all breathing radio radioactive Cobalt 60 and if yes then how harmful is it to us okay so same answer as the steel spoons which is yes we are breathing radioactive Cobalt 60 but the quantities are small enough that it doesn't cause

10m 13s problems in fact there is a lot of radioactive uh elements in the air that we breathe the most important one being uh carbon 14 and uh that again uh the cosmic rays that are hitting Earth are continuous ly converting our regular carbon into radioactive carbon and we keep breathing that in and it goes into our bones and our blood and our brain and everywhere and uh that is the carbon that ends up being used in carbon dating by the way so many many million years from now if somebody finds your bones they will know exactly what year you are living in well not exactly the year but around the period um mukund has a question mukund says steel is not

10m 57s smelted only in place is where these nuclear tests have happened it is melted globally so is that steel still um contaminated yes what happened was that the Cobalt 60 uh dispersed in the atmosphere and in a short amount of time it pretty much went all over the world so it's pretty much uh it's there everywhere now and that is also the reason why we should avoid a nuclear war because even if the nuclear part of the war happens only in one place hey the world air currents atmosphere vishes has comments he he says uh it reminds him of the hes nuclear spill case yes again we it's very important that none of this should be confused with the deadly

11m 45s nuclear spills bad radiation Fukushima and so on right this is Tiny Trace Amounts which is not dangerous okay VES that's a VES Tippy for you L lth asks how can you use pre-1945 steel without exposing it to the current contaminated Air at contaminated atos so the important thing to realize is that just steel sitting in the atmosphere doesn't absorb cobal 60 right the reason why all our steel has the Cobalt 60 in it is that when the steel is being made carbon dioxide is being passed through it and that carbon dioxide is being uh uh absorbed by the steel and as part of that uh it grabs some Cobalt 60 also but once the steel is made it is no

12m 40s longer you know changing you have questions put them in the comments of the video or if you're listening to this on podcast send it to us via tweets navin's Twitter handle will be in the show notes in the description of this particular uh session uh Zubin has a question or rather comment same thing with wine and painting pigments that is a very interesting comment just like all the steel in the world is contaminated similarly uh all the wine in the world and all the paints paintings in the world are also uh contaminated with uh Trace elements of other radioactive material and as a result um this is actually used to check for forgeries okay if uh I mean there have been cases

13m 30s where a wine which was claimed to be really really old uh was found to be newer because it contained uh post 1945 uh uh radiation uh I mean results of radiation similarly there are I mean you might have seen uh episodes on TV of crime dramas where uh painting turns out to be a forgery because by analyzing the paint you see that it contains uh paints with radiation in them yeah and you can also see episodes where the forger actually tried to cover up for that fact I think there's a white color episode I'll look it up and put it in the description later for you to check out in the show notes for you to check out

14m 11s but oh there is one more question uh how do they detect Dark Matter using steel which I think we've covered in the episode but let's actually so just to be clear they are not detecting the Dark Matter using steel they're detecting it using sensitive scientific equipment but the rest of the equipment has Steel in it which interferes so the steel is needed the non-contaminated steel is just needed to build the rest of that instrument uh without interfering with the uh sensitive sensors right and you have questions you can put them in the comments or send us a tweet send a tweet to naen but here is a question for you and for naen as well are there any

14m 54s estimates of how close we are to complete using up all of this pre-1945 steel actually I don't know the answer to that so if any of you know the answer please post them in the comments or tweet it at us and we would love to update the episode with that thank you yeah and we will keep updating it every time we get a fresh estimate of whatever quantity there is no we are not going to do that this is Shri Kant that's naen this is future IQ thank you thank you for watching till the end if you like this episode check out these others you might like them also and please share with your friends I'm sure they will

15m 34s also like these thank you