When I was 9 years old, I wrote a letter to the Department of Energy in the United States from my primary school in Australia asking them for information about nuclear technology.
The kindly sent me a huge package, with so much information, I devoured it whole.
@ENERGY Even though your twitter account is kinda lame right now, you were really awesome back then and I always admired you.
It's part of what inspired me to become a physicist, I really admired the scientists involved. I don't regret it at all even though I didn't end up using that degree in my day to day work.
The state of America really hurts my heart.
Knowing what it was, and what it could have been, and what it is today.
And by the way, back then there was no internet, and libraries were useless for this kind of information!
They opened up a world that was entirely inaccessible to me and I've been inside that world ever since.
Who knows, maybe one day I will work for @ENERGY, if peace reigns.
...Peace and lack of gayness.
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First of all let's establish a perspective.
In WW2, the RAF conducted a two day operation to destroy Mohne Dam in Germany.
Special 2-5 ton bombs were created and it took 5 bombing raids to finally destroy it, A total of 10 tons finally did the job.
How big was Mohne dam? ~35m high and 650m long. Let us be conservative and claim a 10 ton explosive charge at its base would be enough to destroy it.
Today the largest explosive that would work under water would be the MOP, which has a 2.4 ton (but a penetrating warhead).
BREAKING: Huge Russian missile attack strikes many facilities of the Kiev regime's military. More and more missiles are heading in Kiev's direction.
This is one of the largest attacks to date on the capital. AD has failed entirely.
PHYS003: Fission bomb design & history
In this short thread, we're going to learn about "critical mass", timing circuits and with them, we'll combine what we learn in PHYS001 & PHYS002 to learn how the ultimate weapon was created:
The nuclear bomb!
Let's discuss how it works too!
In the previous instalment, we learnt about conventional bomb design and the importance of casing, timing and symmetry.
As it were, this is even *more* important for nuclear bombs. But keep it in mind as well as the principle of fission as we move forward.
Nuclear fission is a chain reaction, but it exhibits an interesting phenomenon. For each type of reaction (slow, fast neutron etc.),there is a probability of the reaction taking place. We call the total reaction rate area as the "cross-section".
Every atom/reactant pair has one!