'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.
beacon294 8 minutes ago [-]
You're really gonna go for "heavy lifting"? "The honest truth": I am starting to skip comments as soon as I hit these phrases.
tastyfreeze 5 hours ago [-]
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.
tomatocracy 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
cucumber3732842 35 minutes 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.
tokai 5 hours ago [-]
I bet a nuclear foundry can be bundled with atomic mining ala Project Plowshare. Guess we are lucky we didn't get the future the atomic age promised.
WorldMaker 3 hours ago [-]
Using the Project Orion spacecraft to get there, of course.
Not the most economical manufacturing process, it has to be said.
boothby 5 hours ago [-]
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.
hparadiz 4 hours ago [-]
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.
You can probably skip the town in the ingredient list.
sawjet 5 hours ago [-]
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.
BizarroLand 2 hours ago [-]
The real expense is in rebuilding the city every cycle
forinti 3 hours ago [-]
It might be a bit tough getting the permits from the EPA.
BizarroLand 2 hours ago [-]
Call it the Cheeto in Charge Manufacturing Center and you'll get a fastpass
perpetuallunch 3 hours ago [-]
Well it appears to be the cheapest method known to produce at least some metal alloys.
indrora 5 hours ago [-]
It'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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
perpetuallunch 3 hours ago [-]
Sure.
70,000 dying in a flash certainly puts an end to their suffering.
wbl 3 hours ago [-]
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.
MeteorMarc 4 hours ago [-]
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.
WorldMaker 3 hours ago [-]
This alloy is naturally the macguffin in a Godzilla and/or Sentai film.
catlover76 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
metalman 5 hours ago [-]
Hey! ,this is great! next we can have moskitonium, londinium(heh), and washingtondcinite, rare valuable collectables for some far future alien travellers
DiggyJohnson 1 hours ago [-]
why would you wish for this?
wartywhoa23 38 minutes ago [-]
He's not wishing, he's warning sacrastically 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.
samatman 1 hours ago [-]
It's in the user name: he's metalman.
He collects metals. Made of men.
wartywhoa23 44 minutes ago [-]
Did they disclose the amount of human souls in that alloy?
Rendered at 21:13:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
Nuclear cement kiln
Nuclear pile jetter
Nuclear tunnel boring machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...
(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.
He collects metals. Made of men.