Common Bricks May Record Evidence of Nuclear Weapons

I trust you are n’t work nuclear weapon in your service department . If you are , your bricks know what you ’re doing .

researcher have long consider retrospective dosimetry — looking at what kind of irradiation was present in a elbow room based on the touch depart over in the environment . Frequently , this requires lots of treatment and work . One team of researchers at North Carolina State University thinks they have a mere way to detect the remnant radiation plainly by taking a core of material out of a brick . Something like this could be important for thing like atomic weapons review .

“ The potential is there for it to be something really important for the nonproliferation regime , ” graduate student Ryan O’Mara recount Gizmodo .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

The system uses method acting already used by archaeologists to go steady their finds , said O’Mara . fundamentally , radiation such as gamma ray or x - rays can excite electrons in quartz quartz . The electrons get trapped in part of the quartz ’s structure and bide there for a while . count the electrons by exciting them out of the hole allow the researchers to see how much radiation there was in the room and where it came from .

late studies have treated the brick first , but O’Mara and his consultant enquire if they ’d be able to read the radiation without isolating the quartz grain . After testing some brick with a actinotherapy generator , practise a core into the brick , and reading what came out , they incur that they could reasonably faithfully reconstruct whatever was going on in the room . They publishedtheir paperin the most recent issue of Health Physics .

This is a hard problem to solve . There are possible calibration egress , since building materials are all different , channelize out Stephanie Keehan , nuclear natural philosophy lecturer at RMIT University in Australia . She was n’t sure that the method acting without cover the brick first was valid and would like to see the experimentation repeated . Melissa Spencer , wellness physicist at Penn State University , tell Gizmodo in an e-mail that she agreed in the standardisation issues .

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Spencer thought the technique could be crucial . “ What is so interesting about this technique is not only that it could significantly cut down processing clock time and equipment needed ( which is invaluable in an stroke scenario ) , but also that it has the potential to identify what specific kind of radiation make the back breaker , which helps to suffice the question , ‘ What happened here ? ’ ”

There ’s plenty more work to be done , of course of action , and other ways to passively detect radiation , including “ neutron energizing analysis , ” charge out Keehan . In that depth psychology , ingredient in a stuff are key by bombarding them with neutrons . But she mention that while not being so radical , the method could make it easy to determe what form of radiation the brick saw .

That ’s end goal here , after all , enounce O’Mara : To make it more difficult for people to build atomic weapons without getting caught . “ If this method is deployed in the field , there ’s always a demodulator watch . ”

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