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In a sort of a reversal of the problem that Clair Patterson had, wherein, as you will recall, his research was contaminated by environmental lead, originating in gasoline additives, researchers attempting delicate studies of very far away phenomena need shielding, namely lead, that is not contaminated by radioactivity.
Fine article available at The Atlantic.
In 2017, Chamkaur Ghag, a physicist at University College London, got an email from a colleague in Spain with a tempting offer. The year before, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, Frank Calaprice, had learned of old Spanish ships that had sunk off the New Jersey coast 400 or 500 years ago, while carrying a cargo of lead. Calaprice obtained a few samples of this lead and sent it off to Spain, where a lab buried within the Pyrenees tested its radioactivity. It was low: just what Aldo Ianni, the then-director of the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, was hoping for. Now that sunken lead was being offered to any physics laboratory willing to pay 20 euros per kilogram—a fairly high price—for it.
Lead is mined and refined all over the world, but that centuries-old lead, sitting in a shipwreck, has a rare quality. Having sat deep underwater since before the United States of America was born, its natural radioactivity has decayed to a point where it's no longer spitting out particles. For particle physicists, that makes it exceptionally valuable.
Source of radioactive contaminants in lead? Yes, you guessed it!
Take steel: It's an excellent shield from intruding vagabond particles—so much so that Fermilab, a particle-physics and accelerator laboratory in Illinois, has used tons of it in the past few decades to shield its own experiments, says Valerie Higgins, Fermilab's historian and archivist. That steel frequently came from decommissioned warships, many of which existed around the time of, or served in, the Second World War or the Korean War, including the Astoria, the Roanoke, the Wasp, the Philippine Sea, and the Baltimore.
The timing of those conflicts matters. At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first-ever nuclear-device detonation took place in the Jornada del Muerto desert, in New Mexico. The atomic age had begun, and with each subsequent nuclear fireball, more radioactive fallout was sprinkled over the world.
During the Cold War, that radioactive atmospheric contamination got effortlessly sucked into blast furnaces when steel was made, Duffy says. This infused the final product with radiation, making it unsuitable for many physics experiments.
Thus the market in sunken lead. And a conflict between astrophysics and archeaology. Ah, science!
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @12:28AM
A tempest in a tea pot.
Maybe these economists get some sense and throw off its physics envy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @12:51AM (1 child)
#DarkMatterMatters
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday November 02 2019, @01:15AM
#DarkMatters
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @03:43AM
mexican food is precursor to dark matter. look in a mexican restaurant?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:26AM (4 children)
Comments like these, and people blame me for alt-right submissions? Are we no longer capable of rational discussions on science?
(Never mind, rhetorical question. Runaway, that means you don't have to answer it. )
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:17AM
Shitposting is how they deal with their anger when the world doesn't coddle them.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:35AM (2 children)
Not to worry, Alt-Starchus. A grand daughter filled her diaper with Alt-Starchus validation, so you're safe.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:26AM (1 child)
Be silent, Runaway! Your radioactive contamination is leaking across your flash resistant work clothes. Careful.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:44AM
My above post was made silently, you silly twit.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:32AM (12 children)
There is still lead in the earth's crust, right? "New" lead can't be mined, and handled to prevent contamination during processing? I'm not believing for one minute that these ships are the only possible source of non-radioactive lead on earth. Someone is building a narrative here, on which they hope to profit.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:31AM (10 children)
Yes, Runnyway, that is because you are an idiot. Just think of it this way: Patterson's problem was solved by inventing a Clean Room. Here the question if building the clean room in the first place, you need an "inside out" clean room, which means if you expose your ore, or the metal at any point in processing, to ambient air, it is likely to be made useless for a clean room. I know this involves particles and science, instead of your usual "baling wire and duck tape" approach, but please try to understand why your comment is less than helpful.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:42AM (9 children)
Please, don't try to make real world analogies for which you are not equipped. You use "duck tape" to keep your ducks in a row, or some such. I use "duct tape" for a number of things, including sealing the seams of ducts. If you can't keep simple things like that straight, how do you propose to comprehend the mining and smelting and further processing of lead ore? You probably aren't even aware that the smelting of lead (and other) ore no longer requires the use of blast furnaces, or the continuous blast of air associated with blast furnaces. A modern invention called "electricity" can theoretically reduce a small mountain of ore, to an ingot, potentially in a vacuum.
Also, please stop exposing yourself, and your "ore", as well as your "metal".
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @10:40PM
Runaway has fallen for one of the oldest errors in the book! The first is "never get involved in a land war in Asia", but only slightly less known is "do not believe for a second your opponent does not know what duct tape is, and so resist the urge to correct him and make yourself look gullible."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 03 2019, @06:39AM (5 children)
Duck tape is a real thing, Runaway. It's a brand of duct tape.
https://www.duckbrand.com/products/duck-tape [duckbrand.com]
By the way, duct tape isn't very good for sealing ducts.
https://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/duct-tape-HVAC.html [lbl.gov]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 03 2019, @06:47AM
It's almost like Runaway doesn't realize he is being toyed with.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 03 2019, @06:53AM (3 children)
Modded informative. It's true, I've never seen duct tape that actually seals duct work. If you have reason to actually look at HVAC duct, any duct tape present is probably loose, and flapping around. I think a lot of duct tape is used to hold the duct together, while the duct work is lifted into place, then suspended with hangers. Since I've never worked in that field, I can't offer any better explanation. Maybe a lot of HVAC guys believe that the tape will last more than a couple months?
re "duck tape", it has been my experience that "duck tape" is just a cheaper version or grade of "duct tape". Some brands are utter crap, while other brands actually hold stuff together for awhile. "Duck" seems to be the cheapest, most worthless version. But, if you wrap enough of it around your ducks, I presume the ducks will get pissed off?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 03 2019, @11:15AM (2 children)
The real mystery is why you are offering any explanation at all, since you clearly do not know what you are talking about.
Maybe if the Spanish ships had had some Duct Tape on board, they wouldn't have sunk, and the entire Fine Article would never have been written.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 03 2019, @11:35AM (1 child)
LOL - maybe if you and ten friends participated more, I wouldn't venture into so many conversations. If your expertise were posted promptly, I wouldn't need to venture an opinion. This is your opportunity to make a journal entry, telling us everything there is to know about tape of all kinds. And, if you are especially thorough, the only thing I might post is a "thank you", maybe a question, and mod you up. I mean, really, what else is there to say, once an expert has told us everything he knows?
Have a nice day, and try not to be too jealous of me. Not everyone can be me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 03 2019, @09:43PM
Thank you, Runaway1965, for sharing your ignorance and lack of knowledge here on SN. If not for you, those "know-it-all" SJW libtards would have taken over the place already!
--
Gohmert/Gaetz 2020! Dumb and Dumber for the win!
(Score: 2) by chromas on Sunday November 03 2019, @07:18PM (1 child)
Duc[k|t] tape is (or used to be) made out of duck cloth. I think the duct spelling came a bit later, though.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 03 2019, @08:17PM
The wikipedia agrees with you, but original duck tape was not adhesive. The history is somewhat interesting, if you care to read it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape#History [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Saturday November 02 2019, @03:10PM
I think the problem is that the mining and smelting processes are so inherently “dirty” that it’s easier to get the lead from shipwrecks.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:44AM (1 child)
I wonder if it would be possible to adapt technology previously used for uranium enrichment to separate out the non-radioactive lead from a sample of modern lead. Pb-210 is probably the most problematic since it has a half-life of 22 years, and this is likely the biggest contaminant they're concerned with. Pb-202 is entirely synthetic, so there probably isn't a lot of it from freshly mined and refined lead even if it does have a half-life of 50,000 years. Pb-205 has a half-life of 17 million years, so there probably is still a significant quantity of it even in samples mined and smelted before the atomic age, but its long half-life also means it isn't such a big radioactive source. The next longest compared to Pb-210 is Pb-209 with a half-life of three hours, and the rest are even shorter-lived so they are probably inconsequential. It probably would be possible to create a sample of lead which contains largely the non-radioactive isotopes (Pb-206, 207 and 208) and negligible amounts of anything else using a gas centrifuge or similar apparatus like what is used to enrich U-235 from natural uranium, but it's probably more expensive to do so than it would be to buy lead from a sunken ship at €20/kg.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:14PM
Besides price, most governments wouldn't let the technology become common as it could be so easily re-purposed to uranium enrichment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @07:01AM (1 child)
>Ah, science
Ew, pollution
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @06:09PM
>>Ah, science
>
>Ew, pollution
OMG KARDASIANS!
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday November 02 2019, @03:39PM
Does this mean that when local governments decide to upgrade their prewar lead plumbing they'll be able to sell off the old pipes?