New Uranium Compound Could Lead to Atomic Hard Drives

[Arcanist]

Depleted Uranium as is typically called is basically leftover from enrichment. It really is basically all the uranium that couldn't be used for something else, and will ultimately break down.

Meaning that it isn't 'non-radioactive', as claimed by the article.

I can understand the difference, having worked with both depleted uranium(which is all but calling it junk uranium) and lead. They don't behave the same.

And I never said they where the same thing, just that once this depleted uranium decomposes it's no longer uranium.

 

[WanderingFool]

Brings a whole new meaning to rage-quitting.

Hmm, wonder how many funny things I can think of about this subject and that picture...

1: Thats one hell of an overclocking job you did there...
2: Opps, computer crashed.
3: guess you should add another cooling fan to the case...

Damn... Only three and one of them really sucks...

 

[yndsu]

Sorry to ruin your day, but DU (Depleted Uranium, no I'm not typing that out everytime I say it) is only weakly radioactive, its radioactivity in DU munitions isn't useful, its its Pyrophoricity (Burns on contact with air) and, on impact, forms a sharp projectile that can penetrate deeper armor layers.

DU munitions drawbacks are that it is both pyrophoric and a toxic metal, its easily absorbed in dust form and effects many of the body's systems. Aside from that, its a very dense, easily obtained metal, which before the research into its biological effects, made it a good metal for use in penetrator weapons.

Like i said, fair enough. It is use indeed mostly for it's weight as it is denser and heavier than led. And US Military has loads of it left over since the Cold War. So it is easy to access and use for them.

 

[spectrenihlus]

So how big we talking? 10 terabytes? a petabyte? 1 million yottabytes?

Could you imagine a 1 yottabyte hard drive?

 

[Ozzythecat]

Whats the point really?

I mean for server's and storage companies I guess it makes sense, but for average user is it really all that necessary? I built myself an 8 TB External Raid, and I barely use any the space on the thing, and and I am a massive media junkie, I've backed up my entire collection of movies and box sets, along with a lot of my PS2 and older games, along with a bunch of PC games. I know people that barely use half of their 750 gig hard drives.

If you somehow needed even more space than that you could still go one step higher and setup your own File Hosting server.

Though I suppose for the less technically apt or lazy I guess I could see the point.

 

[yndsu]

Yeah, that is shady. Even when it is depleted it is still very radioactive.
So i would not want one of those in my house.
If they wanna use them in server-farms to store data be my guest.
But there is already way too much chemical stuff that is bad for your health
in any household and adding depleted uranium would not help it at all.

A foolish assumption. Depleted uranium is very stable, and the dangers of it's pathetic levels of radiation are eclipsed by it's status as a heavy metal like lead. Your more likely to develop heavy metal poisoning than radiation induced tumors, and since these hard drives would use it in such small concentrations that are confined within the device itself, contact would be rare and harmless.

Indeed that contact would be rare and to most part harmless, but like i said, i personally still would rather not have any of it in my house.

Also, like it was stated in the video poste earlier, this HDD would only work 2 degrees below absolute and to get that is not possible and those HDD's would not work (by what i understud from the video). So yeah, so much about that.

 

[Ozzythecat]

So how big we talking? 10 terabytes? a petabyte? 1 million yottabytes?

Could you imagine a 1 yottabyte hard drive?

My god... THE SCIENCE!

The firmware you would need for that to even work...

 

[thethingthatlurks]

its not weapons grade uranium so its impossible to detonate but the radition would be an issue. (most people don't realize that lead shielding only stops some forms of radiation.)

Yeah, that pesky cosmic radiation goes right through my lead brick wall. Works fine for gamma rays though...

Sooo...the paramagnetism of supercold compounds is nothing new, but the fact that it was made with uranium is quite cool (see what I did there?) Anyway, this still an active area of research for inorganic chemists. That said, the cold necessary for this to work is more of a hazard than the radioactivity associated with uranium, which isn't much of a problem to begin with. I'm quite curious when the first compounds exhibiting this behavior at liquid nitrogen temperature or higher are developed. Now that would be a neat tittle thing for large server assemblies: storage + cooling at the same time!

 

[Blaster395]

Well Depleted Uranium has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. That may sound like a long time but in a disk of 1,000,000,000,000 atoms (Not very much, its probably much more than this) then you can expect at least a few to decay every day. Of course, you need hard drives to not corrupt data quickly, but on this hard drives you would end up with everything slowly messing up.

 

[Speakercone]

Steve Liddle himself and Martyn Poliakoff dismiss it due to the fact that it only works between 0 and 2 degrees kelvin.

lol I keep forgetting what scientists consider "very low temperatures". So this effect occurs somewhere in the region of absolute zero?

 

[JDLY]

So my case would need 10 feet of lead around it? No thanks, also I don't like the idea of my hard drive having a half life other then the one from valve.

Well unless you're planning to live for roughly 4.5 billion years, you won't have to worry about living through even one half-life.

 

[FarleShadow]

Well Depleted Uranium has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. That may sound like a long time but in a disk of 1,000,000,000,000 atoms (Not very much, its probably much more than this) then you can expect at least a few to decay every day. Of course, you need hard drives to not corrupt data quickly, but on this hard drives you would end up with everything slowly messing up.

Your comment has made my science muscle shrink to the size of a hamster's testicle, then disappear under my house.

Because if we're comparing the chance that the 'few' decaying atoms of an element in your harddrive that could, potentially, decay within 4.468 billion years and that those particular singular radiation bursts could potentially hit DNA that represents a small portion of your body at anyone time and that those affected DNA happen to represent themselves as cancer cells...

I'm sorry, my predictive capacity is limited to events happening in reality, if you would like to contact my quantum-computing co-processor, please *tone* press 1, 2 and 3 before the tone.

 

[spectrenihlus]

So how big we talking? 10 terabytes? a petabyte? 1 million yottabytes?

Could you imagine a 1 yottabyte hard drive?

My god... THE SCIENCE!

The firmware you would need for that to even work...

You would never need a new HDD ever again. Nor will your children's chidlren's children.

 

[CrazyMedic]

Brings a whole new meaning to rage-quitting.

Sir, you win this thread and deserve a cookie:

On topic, do we really need that much hard drive space? I mean, a 250 gigger should be good for the average user, 500 seems pretty good for anyone that games or listens to a lot of music, downloads a lot of videos, etc. And if you need more, we have multiple terabytes now. I could see NASA or big businesses using this, but I really don't think the general public has any need of such massive amounts of space.

Now, if only they could get the internet to run at about 1GB per second, I would be happy. Hell, I'd be happy with a quarter of that.

no not now but think about the future I mean crysis 6 will probably be a terrabyte

 

[Blaster395]

Well Depleted Uranium has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. That may sound like a long time but in a disk of 1,000,000,000,000 atoms (Not very much, its probably much more than this) then you can expect at least a few to decay every day. Of course, you need hard drives to not corrupt data quickly, but on this hard drives you would end up with everything slowly messing up.

Your comment has made my science muscle shrink to the size of a hamster's testicle, then disappear under my house.

Because if we're comparing the chance that the 'few' decaying atoms of an element in your harddrive that could, potentially, decay within 4.468 billion years and that those particular singular radiation bursts could potentially hit DNA that represents a small portion of your body at anyone time and that those affected DNA happen to represent themselves as cancer cells...

I'm sorry, my predictive capacity is limited to events happening in reality, if you would like to contact my quantum-computing co-processor, please *tone* press 1, 2 and 3 before the tone.

I am not on about the radiation being dangerous, I am on about the Uranium decaying into something else messing up the hard drive.

Next time read more than the first line of my post.

 

[ReaperzXIII]

I have had my computer for 2-4 years, don't really know nor care but I still have 129 GB left, I don't really need thousands upon thousands of storage space so I don't really care about this discovery unless it means lag free interwebz services.

A lag free CoD or GoW?! I would be invincible!!!

 

[Neonbob]

...fuck...YES.
>.>
*awkwardly walks out of room while holding a large book against waist*

 

[Squilookle]

Well Steve Liddle of the University of Nottingham, you best lock up your research well, because you can be sure Robin Hood will try to steal it to prevent the Sheriff from using it for evil purposes... Like killing King Richard with it somehow...

 

[FarleShadow]

Well Depleted Uranium has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. That may sound like a long time but in a disk of 1,000,000,000,000 atoms (Not very much, its probably much more than this) then you can expect at least a few to decay every day. Of course, you need hard drives to not corrupt data quickly, but on this hard drives you would end up with everything slowly messing up.

Your comment has made my science muscle shrink to the size of a hamster's testicle, then disappear under my house.

Because if we're comparing the chance that the 'few' decaying atoms of an element in your harddrive that could, potentially, decay within 4.468 billion years and that those particular singular radiation bursts could potentially hit DNA that represents a small portion of your body at anyone time and that those affected DNA happen to represent themselves as cancer cells...

I'm sorry, my predictive capacity is limited to events happening in reality, if you would like to contact my quantum-computing co-processor, please *tone* press 1, 2 and 3 before the tone.

I am not on about the radiation being dangerous, I am on about the Uranium decaying into something else messing up the hard drive.

Next time read more than the first line of my post.

So replace the parts where I said 'DNA' with 'The chance of Radiation removing data' and 'Cancer' with 'The chance that removing acouple '1' or '0' has in corrupting a program.

The probabilities are roughly the same.

 

[dpep56]

Do people not realize this would hardly be dangerous. Uranium is in thousands of products people use everyday and seawater is full of it. Many other radioactive things are in your home as well. Smoke detectors use Americium-241 which is highly radioactive and gives off gamma radiation (which is the most dangerous). As long as your not eating it you are fairly safe.