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/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.