How Building Material Can Help Trace Critical Danger

How Building Material Can Help Trace Critical Danger

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Nuclear weapons can cause a substantial amount of damage to a large population. They have the power to destroy and wipe out a whole city in just minutes. For example, the largest nuclear device ever detonated was the hydrogen Tsar Bomb and it was the equivalent of 50,000,000 tons of TNT. The United States has been the only country to actually use a nuclear bomb in combat and that occurred in 1945 against the Japenese. There are about 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world which is not even accounting for the many that have not been located or found yet. 

Luckily, researchers are developing a new technology that gives them access to see if a facility has ever stored high enriched uranium by taking samples of building materials, according to technologynetworks.com. 

High enriched uranium can be used to produce nuclear weapons. Researchers can now use certain housing structures such as brick and tile to monitor and control nuclear weapons. It will provide researchers with the ability to learn what new kinds of uranium are being used to create nuclear weapons. This method has a large amount of potential and can serve as a very valuable source of detecting nuclear weapons. 

The way this process works is by taking a small sample of the building material and using hardware similar to the hardware that is used to examine radiation exposure of dosimeter badges used by employees in the nuclear power industry. This will not only give researchers access to seeing how much radiation has been exposed, but also what kind of radiation the material has been exposed to. This will keep researchers updated with what nuclear weapons are being composed and made of. Researchers will also be able to know which nuclear materials were being stored in any building material that is sampled.  

Robert Hayes, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University devised this new method. Hayes and his research team have been working on this nuclear detection method for a while.