Nuclear Metals Concord depleted uranium extrusion

Concord, MA company (now largely defunct) that extruded depleted uranium for bullets, and produced tantalum wire by cold-weld die forging. Tom obtained his tantalum cold-weld sample from them.

There's another company started in Concord, which has pretty much gone belly up now, called Nuclear Metals. They used to extrude depleted uranium for all the bullets in the world. After the first Gulf War, Kuwait got contaminated with depleted uranium, and they weren't real happy. The Army has been spending lots of money trying to come up with tungsten alloys to replace depleted uranium as bullets. Nuclear Metals make tantalum wire, all kinds of tantalum products. I got this from them — basically they just take a die, and if you look closely you can actually see some of the die marks where it grabs this and keeps pushing it together as a cold weld. They kept pushing it together about 10 times to exclude the contamination. It's just cold-forged. Tantalum can be deformed probably 99 percent without cracking, even though it's a refractory metal. It's very ductile. Tantalum and niobium are both extremely ductile.