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Geiger counters and other devices that require the highest
sensitivity for detecting radioactivity must be made with low-background
steel.
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Low-background steel is any steel produced prior to the detonation of
the first atomic bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. With the Trinity test and the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and then subsequent
nuclear weapons testing during the early years of the Cold War, background
radiation levels increased across the world. Modern steel is contaminated
with radionuclides because its production uses atmospheric air. Low
background steel is so called because it does not suffer from such nuclear contamination.
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The primary source of
low-background steel is ships that were constructed before the Trinity test,
most famously the scuttled German World War I battleships in Scapa Flow.
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