if every bit of steel produced since 1945 contains radioactive isotopes, is that eventually going to bite us in the ass? Are there long term consequences of not being able to use modern steel for certain products?
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It’s possible to make low-background steel for things where the light irradiation matters, but right now what we do is salvage steel from shipwrecks from before the first nukes.
1) Steel is recyclable. We can reuse old steel from before 1945 again and again.
2) The producers of products that require low background steel are not massive consumers of steel, so our current supplies of low background steel are more than enough for the foreseeable future
3) We can make low background steel. It’s just cheaper to use option 1
4) Background radiation levels are dropping. In the very long term, it stops mattering.
The amount of radioactive isotopes isn’t enough to be dangerous. The only products that need low background steel (made from recycled steel produced before 1945) are products that need to detect radiation like Geiger counters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
It’s going to matter a bit more when we run out of steel from old sunken ships from before the Trinity test (July 16, 1945).
The radiation is coming from two possible sources; the atmosphere (since they’re using oxygen pulled from the air in steel production), and in recycling metal (where there’s a chance they’ll end up with trace amounts of cobalt-60 and other impure metals).
That page points out some examples of machinery we use low background steel in, which really aren’t that many. Still like you say, we’re running out of it (slowly). The shining ray of hope is that the amount of background radiation has gone down (a lot) since the ban on nuclear weapon testing went into effect.
That doesn’t mean it won’t have some radiation to it – that wiki page points out that 0.11 mSv/yr *was the record high* for background radiation; and that now-a-days, it’s 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels. That is for the *world* background radiation, not necessarily the *steel* radiation.
Regardless, we won’t have truly 100% radiation free anything for a very, very long time. And when it comes down to it, and we’ve used all the steel from those sunken ships, we’ll just have to retrain people on how to properly use those instruments, tools, and machines, to tell false positives apart from actual readings – or similarly adjust how we analyze readings from those instruments to account for radiation coming from the steel.
The amounts of radioactive material in steel is so low that it’s not dangerous. Radiation isn’t a problem in low enough concentrations because the thing that kills you is the amount of radiation over a certain amount of time that you are exposed to, so you can get exposed to a rather large amount of radiation over the course of years and is no problem but if you are exposed to a comparatively small amount of radiation over the course of a few minutes, that might kill you. So no, the trace amounts of radioactive material in steel isn’t dangerous.
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