Now this, especially the part about carving up wrecks of the German Navy, sets my BS meter off. I can’t imagine that this would be in any way economical, compared to taking precautions with modern metals to keep out atmospheric contaminations (which you’d have to do anyway, when you melted the old stuff down). Of course, I’ve been wrong before, so is this, in fact, accurate? Or just another urban legend?
Since 1945, the large number of atmospheric nuclear tests have introduced relatively large amounts of radioactive isotopes of various elements into the atmosphere.
If you try to smelt steel these days, even from ore, you’ll still end up with some radioactivity in the finished product, due to things like radioactive oxygen, carbon, etc… in the air.
These isotopes can be separated out, but it’s a project similar in concept to enrichment of uranium, except in reverse.
Why go to all that trouble, if you can go get high quality steel from a relatively shallow depth that is known to be free of any radioactivity?
That’s why they use these uboats that were sunk off the British coast in various places after WWII.
Nothing to add to the steel discussion, but reference to seperating out oxygen isotopes reminded me of an idea that occured to me from an old Isaac Asimov story, ‘pate de foie gras’: “How difficult would it be to keep a goose alive while keeping it from metabolizing anything containing O18 - from the air, from the water it drinks, and from its food?”
As an aside, I doubt that there’s really any meaningful concentration of ‘radioactive oxygen’ in our environment, considering that the longest-lived unstable oxygen isotope, O15, has a halflife of a little bit over 2 minutes. A far cry from radiocarbon decay
FWIW a personal story
I worked for a year with the UK Atomic Energy Authority in a lab where we were monitoring ultra low level decommisioning waste. A very sensitive germanium crystal gamma ray spectrometer was used. This device was surrounded by lead bricks and cadmium plates. The structural frame was built from steel from pre world war 2 ships.
The reason given was that due to all air burst weapons tests, modern steels are of no use.
Whilst the detector could descriminate between isotopes, most of the contamination was of the same isotopes as we were looking for on the waste.
