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Low-Background Metal

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The only effect on the history books were a few confusing accounts of something called 'Greek fire.'
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webscraping
1615 days ago
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great explanation with just some pictures. I loved it much.
Top Lead Extractor
United States
popular
1617 days ago
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fxer
1615 days ago
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I’ve heard of low background steel, which is a great story of cutting up scuttled WWI battleships
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

I didn’t know about the Roman lead used for shielding
https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100415/full/news.2010.186.html

But now I are gotta find out why freshly mined lead has radioactive lead-210 in it but in old mined lead it has already decayed, since the lead atoms themselves all being the same age. Must have to do with trace elements decaying into lead-210
Bend, Oregon
zwol
1585 days ago
Yeah. Lead-210 has a half-life of about 20 years, but it’s part of the decay chain for uranium-238, and there’s enough of that in lead _ore_ that basically all freshly mined lead has some lead-210 in it. Along with a bunch of other radioisotopes, but those are different chemical elements so they are separated out by smelting.
rickhensley
1617 days ago
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I mean, that is *one* solution to the problem...
Ohio
alt_text_bot
1617 days ago
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The only effect on the history books were a few confusing accounts of something called 'Greek fire.'