The "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").
This 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.
Interesting. 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.
No, 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.
IIRC in “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman” he recalls being asked during Manhattan Project (?) for ideas to commercialize atomic energy and they patented whatever the scientists brainstormed up.
Both the US and the Soviet Union actually experimented with "nuclear fracking" in oil/gas fields. The Soviet Union also used atomic bombs to put out fires in gas fields as late as 1981.
The idea was you could use nuclear bombs to dig canals. Or make harbors. Or really any large scale earth moving project. The U.S. did one test shot, a shallow buried bomb intended as a cratering charge. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.176944,-116.046111,4654m This ended up contaminating more people than any other test which put the breaks on that. The soviets had an equivalent study but tried a little harder and are now the proud owners of several new irradiated lakes.
That whole effort was predicated on success of efforts to develop fission-free bombs. That never worked out, although the inertial confinement fusion program is in a way its descendant. The scale of ICF reactors shows why it didn't work out. A slight shame, since this might have made Project Pacer (exploding bombs in caverns to make energy) more feasible. There still would have been enormous tritium production/pollution.
They what?! Can we please get a link to this to read more?!
And yes, I have the same Google as you, but I'd love a link to your preferred telling of the tale of how the Soviets nuked a gas well fire just a couple years before I was born.
Wikipedia has an article about it[0]. Gas had been leaking for three years before they were able to use a nuke to seal the well. Estimated that it was burning 12 million m3 of gas daily.
> the explosive was detonated at a depth of 1,500 m (1,640 yd) on 30 September 1966. The hole that the explosive was lowered into had also been sealed with cement so as to prevent atmospheric radioactive contamination.
I recall we were seriously talking about using one during the early days of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For a variety of reasons it wouldn’t have worked in that instance.
Looks like every time a new “big thing” gets invented, the big thing becomes like a hammer and everything else turns into the proverbial nail. Then it was atomic everything, not its AI everything. Same pattern repeating.
Sounds like an interesting idea and I think there are things like this being done but, couldn't we accomplish the same thing on a smaller scale without all the destruction? What about fusion welding once we get that more locked in? I know it's still a WIP but if we're getting to "millions of degrees", it could speed up the process if we're able to localize the fusion. Also, what about cold fusion? The problem on any of these is the cost -- it may be quicker/better but if the cost is way too high, it's not worth it. Maybe in the future it'll be cheaper/easier.
A disgustingly large and powerful pressurized microwave would likely be sufficient if "all" they need to do is spray various mixes of vaporized metals and water into plasma. I don't know that we've had too many justifications to build these otherwise
> I don't know that we've had too many justifications to build these otherwise
I don't know about you, but "spray various mixes of vaporized metals and water into plasma" sounds cool. If I had tens of millions of dollars, I'd pay to see that.
Could probably get styropryo to do it for a good bit less. The stuff he's doing on his second channel recently is so damn cool https://youtu.be/0Y-9GbsS9Fg
My comment was a bit trite but I was actually hoping for a reasonable shot at doing something worthwhile.
My expectations for doing it properly would be:
- facilities. Sure, high power microwaves and pressure chambers and combining the two may not be THAAAT expensive. But doing it in a calibrated fashion to have a chance to produce predictable repeated results isn't without some details.
- staff. I'd want at least 3 qualified people on it. Preferably multiple teams competing for results exploring different paths of interest.
- timeframe. I'd expect such a thing to last at least 3 years at an absolute minimum but that might only be enough to get to the hardware to a "calibrated repeatable" stage. So probably 5 to 10 to have any hope of meaningful results.
- money. That "if I had tens of millions" is a personal view of my own monetary worth. I wouldn't want to see ALL that used up in this, but I'd put forward a good fraction of it.
'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.
Oklo, Gabon appears to have run a nuclear reactor about 1.7 billion years ago, though whether you can get a natural nuclear explosion on some chunk of rock somewhere might be difficult to tell.
In 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.
Interesting 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.
It 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?
The 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.
Metals 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.
There 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.
I 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.
They 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.
Sure, 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.
He'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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold%E2%80%93aluminium_interme...
Today I learned an interesting new word, which is led me to its analogues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitite
There is a hypothesized process in this paper that sounds like a graduate thesis on its own.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1858/elk-river-rural-americ...
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.
Apparently the shot was quite successful as a natural gas fracking technique, but quite a bit of radon also was released.
The idea was you could use nuclear bombs to dig canals. Or make harbors. Or really any large scale earth moving project. The U.S. did one test shot, a shallow buried bomb intended as a cratering charge. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.176944,-116.046111,4654m This ended up contaminating more people than any other test which put the breaks on that. The soviets had an equivalent study but tried a little harder and are now the proud owners of several new irradiated lakes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shagan_(lake,_Abai_Region)
And yes, I have the same Google as you, but I'd love a link to your preferred telling of the tale of how the Soviets nuked a gas well fire just a couple years before I was born.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtabulak_gas_field
> the explosive was detonated at a depth of 1,500 m (1,640 yd) on 30 September 1966. The hole that the explosive was lowered into had also been sealed with cement so as to prevent atmospheric radioactive contamination.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nat...
> The last nuclear explosion by the Program 7, codenamed Rubin-1, was performed in Arkhangelsk Oblast on September 6, 1988.
Although there is no separate page for that.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-soviets-nuked-gas-well-f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missil...
Nuclear cement kiln
Nuclear pile jetter
Nuclear tunnel boring machine.
Don't give Elon ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doramad_Radioactive_Toothpaste
The tiny spheres of this alloy mixed into a mess of other stuff remind me of Primitive Technology's mostly successful attempts at smelting iron the hard way. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
I don't know about you, but "spray various mixes of vaporized metals and water into plasma" sounds cool. If I had tens of millions of dollars, I'd pay to see that.
My expectations for doing it properly would be:
- facilities. Sure, high power microwaves and pressure chambers and combining the two may not be THAAAT expensive. But doing it in a calibrated fashion to have a chance to produce predictable repeated results isn't without some details.
- staff. I'd want at least 3 qualified people on it. Preferably multiple teams competing for results exploring different paths of interest.
- timeframe. I'd expect such a thing to last at least 3 years at an absolute minimum but that might only be enough to get to the hardware to a "calibrated repeatable" stage. So probably 5 to 10 to have any hope of meaningful results.
- money. That "if I had tens of millions" is a personal view of my own monetary worth. I wouldn't want to see ALL that used up in this, but I'd put forward a good fraction of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...
> 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
Granted, you could always replace the city with the catalyst of course :P
Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening which is also based on randomness.
(In all seriousness, I hope we never, ever in this lifetime cause humans to suffer like we did on that day)
70,000 dying in a flash certainly puts an end to their suffering.
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.
that's debatable. like, worst single instance atrocity? possibly is
Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.
The application sure, but the novelty of it being nuclear rather than conventional kept parties interested in it for quite a while!
He collects metals. Made of men.