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Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoDid they disclose the amount of human souls in that alloy?
- HPsquared 2mo agoNot the most economical manufacturing process, it has to be said.
- tuetuopay 2mo agoYou can probably skip the town in the ingredient list.
- kulahan 2mo agoI know you’re joking, but unironically this might be untrue. One catalyst might be something only found in cities! Granted, you could always replace the city with the catalyst of course :P
- boothby 2mo agoThe paper explains it more as an experimental process than a manufacturing process. Each granule of hiroshimaite captures a "unique" micro-environment. One could imagine an ethical version of this involving conventional explosives in a controlled environment containing a variety of metallic samples of different compositions.
- hparadiz 2mo agoMetals refining in space or a no atmosphere place like the moon. If an alloy is discovered that has properties we want I can see some future civilization popping nukes like pellets to produce it.
- WorldMaker 2mo agoUsing conventional explosives is a real thing that exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosion_welding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosion_welding
- sawjet 2mo agoThere were some nuclear fracking experiments where the nukes cost in the range of a few hundred thousand dollars. It's probably cheaper than you think.
- BizarroLand 2mo agoThe real expense is in rebuilding the city every cycle
- indrora 2mo agoIt's a real blast, though. (In all seriousness, I hope we never, ever in this lifetime cause humans to suffer like we did on that day)
- wredcoll 2mo agoI mean, I'm probably just being contrarian and I too would appreciate it if people stopped suffering, but like, people are suffering worse than that right now as we type this.
- perpetuallunch 2mo agoSure. 70,000 dying in a flash certainly puts an end to their suffering.
- wbl 2mo agoThey did not get vaporized in the fireball. We have survivors at the hypocenter. Intense burns and radiation poisoning killed most plus conventional blast damage mechanisms. Half the acute deaths happened after the first day.
- wredcoll 2mo agoSure, and I dunno, it probably does no one any good, I just find it mildly annoying when people treat the atomic bombs dropped in ww2 as some kind of completely incomparable atrocity. Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!" I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful without comparing them, but lots of awful things happen without involving nukes.
- perpetuallunch 2mo agoThey were certainly a novel way of causing a reasonable amount of death and destruction. Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.
- perpetuallunch 2mo agoWell it appears to be the cheapest method known to produce at least some metal alloys.
- forinti 2mo agoIt might be a bit tough getting the permits from the EPA.
- BizarroLand 2mo agoCall it the Cheeto in Charge Manufacturing Center and you'll get a fastpass
- amelius 2mo agoIt's more of an exploration technique. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening which is also based on randomness.
- tastyfreeze 2mo agoInteresting. Bring on the A-bomb foundries! Had this been discovered during the exploration phase of atomic bomb use we probably would have seen A-bomb foundry proposals. There is a hypothesized process in this paper that sounds like a graduate thesis on its own.
- GolfPopper 2mo agoWhat, you mean, like American Machine and Foundry building nuclear reactors? https://www.ans.org/news/article-1858/elk-river-rural-americas-first-atomic-power-plant/ https://www.ans.org/news/article-1858/elk-river-rural-americ...
- tastyfreeze 2mo agoNo, I mean using atomic bombs to manufacture these alloys at scale. In the 50s a-bombs were proposed for all sorts of workaday uses. Imagine using a small a-bomb for mining just as we use ANFO today. I am sure that somebody will take up the task of reproducing these alloys using intense heat from a non-atomic source. New alloys can be quite lucrative but developing them requires just as much experimentation as making new drugs. I'd imagine that getting to an alloy of 7 metals through progressive experimentation would take awhile. Now we know it's possible and have a possible production path. That is enough to spur some experiments down that road.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- cucumber3732842 2mo ago>Imagine using a small a-bomb for mining just as we use ANFO today. Nuclear cement kiln Nuclear pile jetter Nuclear tunnel boring machine.
- fxtentacle 2mo agoNuclear Toothpaste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doramad_Radioactive_Toothpaste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doramad_Radioactive_Toothpaste
- metalman 2mo ago[flagged]
- DiggyJohnson 2mo agowhy would you wish for this?
- samatman 2mo agoIt's in the user name: he's metalman. He collects metals. Made of men.
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoHe's not wishing, he's warning sarсastically that discussing materials that happen to be byproducts of a mass human sacrifice without any regard to what it in fact was can have future repercussions.
- MeteorMarc 2mo agoThis is really worth a read. Although the origin is an airblast, ground structures and soil is evaporated too into an inhomogeneous plasma. The relative fast cooling adds to the crystal formation.
- catlover76 2mo ago[dead]
- WorldMaker 2mo agoThis alloy is naturally the macguffin in a Godzilla and/or Sentai film.
- HelloUsername 2mo agoRelated: "Strange crystals found inside wreckage from the first nuclear bomb test" may 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155450 87 comments
- anigbrowl 2mo ago'natural experiment' doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I don't know enough about chemistry to tell if this alloy has potentially interesting properties, or it's just interesting because it's something we weren't previously aware of as being possible.
- dmitrygr 2mo agoIt is a previously not-made mix of metals. But nothing in the paper explains why it is interesting. Sure we have not seen alloys with that exact combination, but nor have we seen that one with 2% more Si and 3% less Mo. It lacks a "why do we care?" section. Nor are documented any interesting properties of the same other than existing. What did i miss?
- EdwardDiego 2mo ago> hiroshimaite Today I learned an interesting new word, which is led me to its analogues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitite
- yieldcrv 2mo ago[flagged]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2mo agoJapan was killing about a Hiroshima+Nagasaki worth of Chinese and Southeast Asian civilians every month.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2mo agohttps://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/what-ive-been-reading-245.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/wh...
- yieldcrv 2mo agoNukes weren’t used in other circumstances that would be applicable in
- NopIdoN 2mo agoit took so long to find because it's been hiding
- pfdietz 2mo agoThe "AlAu4" structure comment got me reading about the aluminum-gold phase diagram. One component there, AlAu2, was infamous in the early IC industry for causing chip failures ("purple plague"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold%E2%80%93aluminium_intermetallic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold%E2%80%93aluminium_interme...
- po1nt 2mo agoDeliberately forging metals with nuclear blast is something we need to put in future sci-fi
- killerstorm 2mo agoIn a short story titled 'Glory' Greg Egan described process where hydrogen and anti-hydrogen are forged together into a thin needle: > The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of compressed matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide. Which then explodes in a controlled way
- po1nt 2mo agoInteresting but that doesn't scratch the itch. I imagine something more like crude metalurgist dwarves, assembling a neutrino detector sized ball shaped room, 1 kilometer underground, with demon core shaped device suspended on detonation wires. Aliens thought giving us nuclear fusion would annihilate us without them trying, but we started to using it to make shiny jewelery and fancy chopsticks.
- felooboolooomba 2mo agoSo to make this I just mix up the metals and wait for Mango Mussolini to press the button?
- voidnothings 2mo agoSomehow it reminds me of FMA's take on Philosopher's Stone https://fma.fandom.com/wiki/Philosopher%27s_Stone https://fma.fandom.com/wiki/Philosopher%27s_Stone
- usagisushi 2mo ago[dead]