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From: Hamsterwheel
Hence you can’t take a ballpoint pen into a nuke power plant High-Density Material Contamination (The Tungsten Threat) The actual structural hardware of a ballpoint pen poses a massive risk to facilities that forge, weld, or maintain exotic metals for the nuclear and aerospace sectors. • The Risk: The tiny rotating ball at the tip of a standard ballpoint pen is made of tungsten carbide. • The Impact: If an employee accidentally drops a pen into a molten batch of metal or an active welding pool during maintenance, the plastic body vaporizes, but the tungsten carbide ball will not melt. Because tungsten has an exceptionally high melting point, the ball stays solid, creating a high-density inclusion trapped inside the structural metal. As the component undergoes structural stress, this microscopic defect acts as a localized stress point, prompting fatigue cracks to grow until the component tears itself apart. What Do They Use Instead? To completely remove the risk of firing an employee over an uncertified pen, nuclear sites mandate the exclusive use of specialized markers (such as the Mighty Marker® High Purity line). These are batch-tested by outside laboratories to ensure they are low-chloride, low-halogen, and low-corrosive, making them completely safe to use on any reactor hardware.

Current Thread	Author	Time
Doubt this is true, but very French......[more]	Free Thinking Doggie	07:31:22
>> As some comments say, a 12 Kg ball spinning at 14k RPM is quite a lot of kinetic energy....[more]	Free Thinking Doggie	07:52:52
>> If a sphere of Tungsten weighs 12 Kg, what is it's diameter in cm ?...[more]	Free Thinking Doggie	12:16:25
>> Tungsten is remarkable for its robustness, especially the fact that it has the ... [more]	Free Thinking Doggie	12:26:30
>> Hence you can’t take a ballpoint pen into a nuke power plant ...[more]	Hamsterwheel	13:29:21
>> I have been in a nuclear power station....[more]	Free Thinking Doggie	15:57:54
>> Explains a lot	Denc 🗡	18:20:49

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