this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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I'll go down this rabbit hole for you because I was also curious.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-lead-physics-archaeology-controversy/
they did a whoopsie, lead 210 comes from uranium 238. every 220 years radioactivity drops 1000x which means that 200-300 year old lead is mostly fine. copper notably doesn't have this problem, is dense and is refined to high degree, at scale. it's good enough to shield most of relatively low energy radiation from that isotope (less than 50kev gammas). couple mm of copper should be plenty for many applications
You can still get Job in metal shop