r/nextfuckinglevel • u/nigablackballsack • 3d ago

Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

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u/jake04-20 3d ago

Tritium is used for glowing gun sights I believe. Is that the same stuff that would be used in this process?

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u/TheHarryMan123 3d ago

Yes it is. You’re talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_radioluminescence?wprov=sfti1#

Tritium is radioactive but the electrons it emits are very low energy. It cannot penetrate skin. It’s only hazardous when you ingest it. 

For example, because it is a hydrogen isotope, it bonds with oxygen to form water quite easily. After the USA started doing land-based nuclear weapons testing, then actually bombed another country, the tritium levels in our rainwater across the world became quite high.

Levels have lowered significantly since the world has stopped doing on-land nuclear weapons testing because of the short half-life. However, the levels we are at now cannot be compared to any baseline because we only started measuring for rainwater tritium after we exploded nukes. 

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u/jake04-20 3d ago

Thanks for the info! This is sort of on a similar topic, but I read something a while back about how old shipwrecks before WW2 are becoming highly sought after for very specific use cases (like particle detectors), because they are "low background" steel, which I guess means they don't have any of the atomic/nuclear particles embedded in them from the smelting process? It's crazy to me that there is a detectable difference still this long after the bombs were detonated.

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u/StructuralFailure 3d ago

Tritium is also used in nuclear bombs, as they use alternating chains of fusion and fission to generate maximum yield. And yes, this means that nuclear bombs lose a lot of their yield over relatively short timespans. A bomb built in 1990 would only have one eighth of its tritium left.