Glacial Errata, No. 81

One

Everything changes after the Trinity detonation, of course, but one unexpected thing that changes forever is the manufacture of steel.

Two

Steel is made using what’s known as the Bessemer Process, by which compressed air is forced into molten pig iron in order to force out impurities and transmute it into steel.

But after the advent of the Nuclear Age, and the era of above-ground nuclear testing, a brand new set of human-made radionuclides entered the atmosphere. These found their way into the air (and later, pure oxygen) that was used in steelmaking, with the result being that steel made after 1945 has a weak but traceable radioactive signal.

Three

This is fine for most construction, but for certain uses, where precise radiation measurements are required, even this minor imperfection was enough to render the steel useless. Geiger counters, MRI machines and other radiometry mechanics, particle physics labs, etc. thus could not be made with steel manufactured after 1945. They require what’s known as “Low Background Steel,” steel which does not have this trace signature, and which now exists in finite quantities.

Because the thing is, you can’t put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, so you can’t go back to a time when these radionuclides aren’t in the atmosphere. When people say that Low Background Steel exists in finite quantities, it’s because you simply cannot make more of it. Ever again.

Four

The world anthropogenic background radiation peaked in 1963, and began to fall with above-ground testing bans. Background radiation has now reached a level where new steel is once again able to be used in some—but not all—of the aforementioned applications. There are still some specific applications that have to be made either with non-steel metals (like copper), or require salvaged, pre-WWII steel.

Low Background Steel is still valuable enough that, in 2023, a Chinese-registered ship was accused of looting the WWII British naval wrecks HMS Prince and HMS Repulse (both sunk by the Japanese in the early days after Pearl Harbor), attempting to retrieve pre-war steel from the wrecks.

Five

I’m not the first to make this connection, but there is a similar moment going on at the moment with Large Language Models (LLMs) and there desperate need for text written prior to 2022. LLMs work, of course, by scanning massive amounts of text and extracting patterns, and then attempting to sound like human writing. But since 2022, the amount of AI-generated prose available on the Internet has reached a level that it actually corrupts LLM models if introduced into their learning protocols, leading to what’s called “model collapse"—or, if you will, the slop leading the slop. So there’s a scramble to acquire text that is free of this impurity, for the purposes of generating more slop.

Unlike low background steel, however, AI-free text is not a limited resource; you can always write more! But the problem for these LLM shitheads is that they can’t tell which is which.

Which, well, sucks to suck, doesn’t it?

T-shirt art by Gilbert Hernandez; you can buy your own here (this is not an affiliate link, I get nothing from the sales, I’m just in it for the love of being a hater).