But of all these steels perhaps the most obscure is something called low-background steel. This is a metal that is completely uncontaminated with radionuclides – a type of nuclear energy – and is essential for the production of sensitive equipment like Geiger counters and some medical devices. And producing low-background steel from scratch is essentially impossible today. Ever since the first atomic bombs were detonated, Earth’s atmosphere has contained tiny amounts of nuclear contamination – isotopes such as cobalt-60. The quantities are so small that they pose little discernible risk to
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