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Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast

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Re: Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast

#61

Post by vidarh »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #33
tastyfreeze wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Imagine using a small a-bomb for mining just as we use ANFO today. Nuclear cement kiln Nuclear pile jetter Nuclear tunnel boring machine.

> Nuclear tunnel boring machine.

Don't give Elon ideas.

Re: Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast

#63

Post by prox »

27183 wrote: post #49
tastyfreeze wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was some truly crazy shit happening in the late '50s-early '60s: 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...

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.

Re: Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast

#64

Post by pfdietz »

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").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold%E2%80%93aluminium_interme...

Re: Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast

#65

Post by pfdietz »

somat wrote: post #60
tomatocracy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See also: operation plowshare. 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…

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.

Re: Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast

#67

Post by killerstorm »

po1nt wrote: post #66

Deliberately forging metals with nuclear blast is something we need to put in future sci-fi

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.

Which then explodes in a controlled way

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