Radiation damage is a well-known phenomenon that is of paramount importance at XFELs. However, the recent development of nanofocused hard X-ray beams at 3rd and 4th generation synchrotron radiation facilities has pushed the values of the instantaneous power density to limits where this problem must be considered in these experiments, too. A positive approach to this situation consists in exploiting the defects induced by X-ray irradiation in order to tailor the material properties in a desired way at the nanometric level. This direct-write X-ray nanopatterning (XNP) technique implies no etching and has already proved to be suitable to locally modify the electrical properties of both semiconducting and superconducting oxides. [1,2] The typical experimental setup consists of a 17.5 keV beam, about 50 × 50 nm2 in size and with a time-averaged photon flux of the order of 1011 photons per second, and in principle also allows for on-line electrical monitoring during device fabrication.[3] X-ray nanodiffraction experiments on Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (Bi-2212) and YBa2Cu3O7-δ (Y-123) whisker-like single crystals have shown that these irradiations induce the appearance of grain boundaries with a corresponding increase of the crystal mosaicity, along with a decrease of the oxygen non-stoichiometric content δ, which shifts the material doping status towards the underdoped regime. It has also been proved that an exponential relationship exists between the material resistivity and the irradiation dose or fluence, and that relaxation of pre-existing stress can take place during irradiation. Presently, the microscopic mechanisms implied in XNP have been not elucidated yet. According to numerical simulations, the heating induced by the nanobeam cannot be responsible for ordinary melting, and also photogenerated electrons knocking on the loosely-bound Bi-2212 interstitial oxygen atoms can only play a minor role. Nevertheless, XNP has already been used to fabricate stacks of intrinsic Josephson junctions out of Bi-2212 whiskers [4]. In principle, this technique also allows the fabrication of many in-series stacks of Josephson junctions, which could increase the chances for the observation of superradiance.