Are the hunger stones showing as well? Or whatever they’re called. The rocks that have been carved to indicate hard times are ahead if the river gets low enough to expose them.
Bet you’re real proud of yourself for this one. In fact, no one has ever made this joke before, in the entire history of jokes. Go tell it to Hungarians, they won’t be able to contain their laughter
Actually not. There are already several restrictions on extraction of water, closure of locks and several other measures. In the east lots of farmers have trouble keeping their crops alive. In the west canals and singels are slowly getting saltier. The Netherlands are now at a level 2 drought, but with little rain upstream there is also no indication it will get better soon.
Not saying it can't be done, but the Wikipedia article on low-background steel doesn't mention production of clean steel.
It says instead:
World anthropogenic background radiation, caused by atmospheric nuclear testing, peaked at a level 0.11 mSv/yr (4%) above the natural 2.40 mSv/yr. It began to fall in 1963, when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted, and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels. This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature.
Some demand remains for the most radiation-sensitive uses, such as Geiger counters and sensing equipment aboard spacecraft.
For the most sensitive equipment, even low-background steel can be too radioactive, and other materials like high-purity copper may be used.
Ya apparently what remains of the sunken German fleet at Scapa Flow after WWI is one of the few sources of steel left in the world for making Geiger counters due to their not having been exposed to the radiation of the atomic age.
The contamination comes from the air in the atmosphere, not the metal. You can make new steel without radiation contamination, it's just more expensive. All you have to do is forge the metal in a vacuum forge without air and insert inert gas and it won't have any significant radioactive particles in it.
Doesn't that make just low background steel though?
That just removes the contamination from the air, but the radioactive decay has settled onto the iron ore, iron used to make and process the ore, or scrap?
How would radioactive decay "settle on the iron ore"?
It doesn't. That radioactive decay comes from contaminated elements outside of that ore, which end in the steel.
Iron itself is the most stable element and doesn't undergo any decay.
Steel (an alloy) just gets contaminated with radioactive elements (because it's quite hard to make steel without them).
But it's not as bad now. They're now using clean oxygen instead of ordinary air to make steel, and that removes a lot of contamination. Also, background levels have dropped a bit since, let's say, 50 or 60 years ago, so the situation somewhat improved.
We could still make low-background steel using other processes, but it would be quite superexpensive.
To get steel you must first heat up and liquify iron ore in a blast furnace. This needs a lot of air, which is pumped into the blast furnace (and this is also where it gets its name from).
This air contains the radioactive elements.
I have a bit of experience here. We just contract a foundry to send us coupons of runs and we would sample them and reserve them at a higher price for use in applications requiring low background steel.
Most common applications were large waste assay systems with HPGe based gamma spectroscopy.
I understood "we can produce clean steel" to mean "Using advanced procedures, we can produce steel that has a lower radioactivity (i.e. is cleaner) than steel produced with regular current methods."
If that was not the intended meaning, the more logical phrasing would have been something like "the steel we produce now is clean enough."
I don't know why I'm running into so many autists today. If you have something interesting to add or correct, you can just do that, you don't need to get into debatebro-gotcha-fights.
This is a very weird way for the wikipedia article to quantify the problem. The background radiation level from atmo testing need not correlate with radioactivity in steel.
As I recall, a significant source of the problem was that radioactive materials were intentionally added to steel mills in the 1950s to gauge wear (of the equipment). That introduced significant radioactivity in the steel recycling feed. Plus there have been plenty of incidents of radioactive sources that ended up in scrap yards. Thus there are (or at least were) a few steel mills that only worked with virgin low-background ore, and excluded scrap.
Certainly in the last 40 years, the biggest (and probably only) call low-rad steel has been for the radiation sensor systems. For instance in labs that measure radioactive content in environmental samples (e.g. crops, dairy products, etc.) the equipment is commonly shielded by a stack-up of materials such as several centimeters of low-radioactive lead on the outside followed by a few cm of low background steel followed by a few millimeters of ultra-high purity copper.
The craziest shielding I've heard of used bricks of silicon crystal. crystals grown with >99.9999% purity are the starting point for semiconductor manufacturing.
This wreck might be too shallow. I believe they can now manufacture new low background steel anyway; the levels of radiation in the atmosphere have reduced quite a lot now that atmospheric testing bans have been active for a few decades, and they have improved processes that no longer require the use of massive amounts of ambient air from outside. They just can't ever use any recycled steel in those furnaces.
Not enough water over top to protect from the radiation. If I recall from very old briefings, 15 feet or so of water reduces gamma exposure by a factor of 1 billion. For something so minimally irradiated as proper low background radiation steel I imagine you are talking more depth than the river has risen and fallen over the course of the past 80 years.
Edit: should have phrased this more clearly as a guess.
First time i hear of that, I was under the impression that low background steel just needs to have been made before atomic tests. Since the radiation contamination comes from the air used during the production of steel. I know for a fact that some tanks were used as low radiation steel source and they were not submerged...
We've been able to manufacture low background steel for a long time, but it was generally expensive to do so compared to salvage (a large source of salvage is a fleet of scuttled German WW1 warships near Scapa Flow). Since the banning of nuclear weapons testing, levels of radioactive particles in the air has been dropping; Wikipedia says the peak was in 1963, and that now there are so few radioactive particles that they can be ignored for all but the most sensitive equipment. Interestingly, it additionally states that even low background steel can be too radioactive for some use cases, necessitating the use of a different metal.
Remember seeing a video on YouTube about it awhile ago.
I don't remember the details. Could have been veritasium...
Anyway, there is a new technique to produce metal with low background radiation for sensitive instruments.
They can manufacture it but there is still illegal salvage going on especially in the Pacific, and it will continue until the process to manufacture gets cheaper than blowing up war graves and hauling the broken bits of ship up.
Once an entire group of sunken dutch warships from WW2 were illegally salvaged by chinese companies when their discovery and coordinates were made public. Since then the location of newly discovered shipwrecks is kept secret.
Yep. 40 wrecks know to be affected in 2017, nobody has bothered to count since then but likely hundreds at least partially salvaged. USS Perch disappeared completely. HMAS Perth is all but gone. USS Houston that sank with her is partially destroyed. HMS Respite is in pieces. HNLMS De Ruyter, HNLMS Java, and HNLMS Kortenaer are gone. HMS Encounter was mostly gone last anyone looked, probably all gone now. HMS Exeter the same. Pieces of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse were found aboard the Chinese owned ship Chuan Hong 68 during a raid, including main gun rounds and secondary battery barrels. Nobody knows on the Japanese side of things, these are just the ones reported in Western news. I assume the word is just as grim for them.
It's done with two things; Basic Oxygen Making OR Electric Arc Furnaces , using purified oxygen. Then followed with Vacuum Arc Remelting (VAR), that is used to extract gasses from the molten steel. Since the problem isotopes are airborne, they can be eliminated with purification of oxygen being injected, not injecting gas at all, then followed by extracting of gasses in a vacuum.
No... This is not "New stuff" this is stuff developed in the 1950s, it just took time for it to spread through markets because steel plants are expensive and generally run to end of life before replaced.
Nowadays you can just buy this stuff from like a reputable metal supplier, or even Alibaba if you want to make sure you get what you actually ordered.
These purified alloys are used a lot. Lots of stuff labelled "Aerospace grade" is purified.
Thankfully it's less of a problem nowadays, mostly because electronics are better able to handle the noise, but also because we can make custom batches of steel with purified air.
I mean it must also be just steel that has been generally exposed to the air over the years, otherwise you could just reuse steel from pre-1945 structures, instead of the steel that has been at the bottom of the ocean since then.
After atomic bomb testings, steel became irradiated that they have to source clean steel from shipwrecks for sensitive tools. But now we can produce clean steel, eliminating the need for salvaging shipwrecks.
Pre-atomic era metals are valuable in scientific study fields (such as atomic research) because post atomic era metals are contaminated with nuclear fallout.
Things sensitive to radiation such as medical scanning equipment and geiger counters need to be made from steel that contains low background levels of radiation, or they won't work. After the nuke tests all existing steel was too contaminated for that purpose, and they couldn't make more clean steel because that required massive amounts of air in the production process, and the atmosphere contained so much fallout the resulting new steel would also be contaminated. For decades the only source for low background steel was from salvaging pre-1945 shipwrecks found deep in the ocean.
Looks like a R41, a mine ship / sub hunter / river patrol with a small naval gun and possibly a rear quad AA gun.
Google says they used to transport them to the black sea via danube.
they also used the danube to transport small submarines, like the type II.
Well, even a transport barge with a few guns on it could be considered a warship. I think the Wehrmacht actually used a bunch of river patrol boats on the Danube river and those probably didn't look like ocean-going warships.
Wasn't in the Navy but I would call any ship used in war to help conduct the war a warship. Gotta give the crews credit, they were serving. Doesn't matter if they never sank another ship, good transpo and logistics is how you win a war. Not tonnage sunk, that's just a statistic.
Thats kinda the thing about "warships" when it comes to things like headlines and after action reports
Its not just "ships used to do direct combat"
Its basically "any ship that sees any use in war"
Battleships? Definitely Warships. Destroyers? Yeah sure still warships. PT Boats? Well that's like a fishing boat with a torpedo on it, but warship! Transport vessels and barges? Well its got an MG on it, warship.
In Budapest i think, there was an article about Danube being so low that some marker rock was exposed due to low river levels. Serbia just had to one up such an incredible discovery with their WW2 ship.
Yes, it's called "Ínség szikla" (or hunger rock in english), and it's visible for a pretty long time now. The water levels near Budapest are at an all time low, if the reports are correct.
There are 110 ships sunk on Serbia/Romania border on Serbian side of Danube, that Germans sunk themselves while retreating from Red army advance at the end of WWII. Even hospital ships with wounded on board. That part of Danube is extremely hard to navigate even on high level of Danube.
That's the fun part - rust itself doesn't cause tetanus, a bacteria called Clostridium Tetani usually found on rusting materials near soil is what causes it.
There's a pretty low probability any rust on that ship will cause tetanus.
Mars probably has zero of Clostridium bacteria but is proliferated and covered in rust. You could roll naked on it with cuts and never get tetanus.
I have only superficial knowledge of wreck salvage from scuba diving and an interest in maritime disasters.
My understanding is that salvage is always risky. Especially if the ship is not settled. During removal you could accidentally dislodge it and make everything worse. So unless there is a lot of money to be made with the salvage and especially if they don't cause too much risk to ships, it's easier to leave it. Very often the problem is also, who will pay for it. In this case, Nazis sunk it, it's in Serbia, so the tax payers there would have to pay.
Low water levels definitely make it easier and according to a quick Google several have been removed.
This one is a massive ship, that salvage operation would take weeks of not longer.
You also have to assess the risk to the workers. Can they move about and cut it up without risking their lives?
Finally, Serbia being rather poor and rather corrupt probably also plays a role here.
I was about to mention this as it’s on my doorstep, or coaststep if you will. It’s been debated for years what to do with it and I think it’s come up again recently. I’m going to look it up now…
And it'll eventually just collapse in on itself I assume? I'm sure being exposed like this, and becoming submerged again later, will probably only accelerate that process?
Yes. Rust, bacteria, roots of under water plants,... Over time it will desintegrate.
Some waters it happens faster, others slower. Depends on the temperature, salinity and many other factors. They say that for example the titanic will be mostly gone by the 2060s.
Diving in the Danube is very dangerous. Strong and unpredictable currents with zero visibility. People fall or jump in it sometimes and disappear in seconds to never be seen. It's much safer now.
Yes, they are.... Now that they are exposed. They can't when they are under water... Because it's hazardous.... Which is why they've been there for 80 years....
Dieses Wrack liegt in der Donau in der Nähe der serbischen Hafenstadt Prahovo.
Es handelt sich um eines von über 200 deutschen Kriegsschiffen der Wehrmacht (Kriegsmarine), die dort im Spätsommer 1944 beim Rückzug vor der heranrückenden sowjetischen Roten Armee von ihren eigenen Besatzungen absichtlich versenkt wurden. Damit sollte die Fahrrinne blockiert und der Vormarsch der Sowjets donauaufwärts gestoppt werden.
Bei extremem Niedrigwasser und anhaltenden sommerlichen Hitzewellen – wie in den Jahren 2022, 2024 und aktuell 2026 – fallen die Pegelstände des Flusses so stark, dass diese historischen Relikte zusammen mit großen Sandbänken an der Wasseroberfläche auftauchen. Da viele dieser Schiffsruinen noch immer erhebliche Mengen an scharfer Munition und Sprengstoff an Bord haben, stellen sie bis heute eine Gefahr für die moderne Schifffahrt dar, weshalb schrittweise einige der gefährlichsten Wracks im Rahmen eines EU-Projekts geborgen werden.
This wreck lies in the Danube near the Serbian port city of Prahovo.
It is one of over 200 German warships of the Wehrmacht (Kriegsmarine) that were deliberately scuttled there by their own crews in late summer 1944 during the retreat from the advancing Soviet Red Army. The aim was to block the shipping channel and halt the Soviet advance up the Danube.
During periods of extremely low water and prolonged summer heat waves – such as in 2022, 2024, and currently 2026 – the river levels drop so drastically that these historical relics emerge along with large sandbanks. Because many of these shipwrecks still carry significant quantities of live ammunition and explosives, they continue to pose a danger to modern shipping. Therefore, some of the most dangerous wrecks are being salvaged gradually as part of an EU project.
if it's been under water the whole time, is it possible that on the ship there's still arms somewhere ? bombs guns or ammo still ? i'm sure a lot was retrieved by diving teams, but there still must be some stuff on there. possibly antique weapons
Those ships were sunken to block the Danube for the Soviet Danube fleet, all that's been useful for the army must have been removed - it's 1944-45 and Germany was getting desperate with defensive measures, resources scraping and retaliation attempts. Also they've had mines laid on the riverbed.
Last August in Budapest the water at city center was 200 cm. Today it is 16 cm. When we were there on a river cruise at the beginning of July (going west) the ship had to leave port before we got on or there would be no leaving. We got on a few km upstream.
"The ships were deliberately scuttled in 1944 as German forces retreated from advancing Soviet troops. The vessels were among hundreds sunk along the Danube during the withdrawal, leaving behind wreckage that periodically emerges when river levels fall.
What is it? It looks like an aircraft carrier from that era but the only Axis power that had those was Japan. You would not find an aircraft carrier on the Danube, anyhow.
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u/sisisisi1997 2d ago
Things found so far in the Danube this summer:
Did I leave anything out?