I’m aware of the whole slavaging shipwrecks because steel made before WWII doesn’t have nuclear fallout in it" thing but, for example the USS North Carolina, BB-55, currently a museum ship sitting in the mud next to the Cape Fear river in Wilmington, she was built in the early days of the war, before America entered the war, is she “pre-war steel?” She’s been in the atmosphere with every detonated nuke and melted down power plant.
Atmosphere doesn’t make cold steel radioactive. The problem is production - impurities are removed through oxidation, i.e., blowing a whole lot of air through molten iron. We take the result from from wrecked ships because nobody’s using them for anything else.
… huh. Wikipedia says it doesn’t even matter nowadays. Background radiation levels are tolerable for instrumentation.
And it’s not prewar steel, so it’s not a big pile of medical-grade scrap.
Shame.
Does it count if it’s above the water?
I’m aware of the whole slavaging shipwrecks because steel made before WWII doesn’t have nuclear fallout in it" thing but, for example the USS North Carolina, BB-55, currently a museum ship sitting in the mud next to the Cape Fear river in Wilmington, she was built in the early days of the war, before America entered the war, is she “pre-war steel?” She’s been in the atmosphere with every detonated nuke and melted down power plant.
Atmosphere doesn’t make cold steel radioactive. The problem is production - impurities are removed through oxidation, i.e., blowing a whole lot of air through molten iron. We take the result from from wrecked ships because nobody’s using them for anything else.
… huh. Wikipedia says it doesn’t even matter nowadays. Background radiation levels are tolerable for instrumentation.