Do you know what Tsar Bomba was? It was the biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded. You don’t hear much about it, do you? It was 50 megatons. The Soviets dropped it from a plane in the Arctic Circle in 1961. Ever hear of Castle Bravo? That was the biggest bomb the United States ever exploded. We don’t hear to much about it, either. The bomb, which was set off in 1954 on the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, was 15 megatons due to a design flaw. It was supposed to be about 5 megatons. The increased power caused increased fallout:
The fallout spread traces of radioactive material as far as Australia, India and Japan, and even the US and parts of Europe. Though organized as a secret test, Castle Bravo quickly became an international incident, prompting calls for a ban on the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear devices.
In addition to the radiological accident, the unexpectedly high yield of the device severely damaged many of the permanent buildings on the control site island on the far side of the atoll. Little of the desired diagnostic data on the shot was collected; many instruments designed to transmit their data back before being destroyed by the blast were instead vaporized instantly, while most of the instruments that were expected to be recovered for data retrieval were destroyed by the blast.
As for the Tsar Bomba:
Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was about 5.4×1024 watts or 5.4 yottawatts (5.4 septillion watts). This is equivalent to approximately 1.4% of the power output of the Sun
So, yeah, I support Obama’s efforts to eliminate these weapons. And scientists should not play around with making different designs, as there can be unpredictable consequences (as the Castle Bravo test demonstrated).
The cause of the high yield was a laboratory error made by designers of the device at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They considered only the lithium-6 isotope in the lithium deuteride secondary to be fissionable; the lithium-7 isotope, accounting for 60% of the lithium content, was assumed to be inert.
It was expected that lithium-6 isotope would absorb a neutron from the fissioning plutonium and emit an alpha particle and tritium in the process, of which the latter would then fuse with the deuterium and increase the yield in a predicted manner.
Contrary to expectations, when the lithium-7 isotope is bombarded with high-energy neutrons, it absorbs a neutron then decomposes to form an alpha particle, another neutron, and a tritium nucleus. This means that much more tritium was produced than expected, and the extra tritium in fusion with deuterium (as well as the extra neutron from lithium-7 decomposition) produced many more neutrons than expected, causing far more fissioning of the uranium tamper, thus increasing yield.This resultant extra fuel (both lithium-6 and lithium-7) contributed greatly to the fusion reactions and neutron production and in this manner greatly increased the device’s explosive output.
So, yes, I support all nuclear non-proliferation efforts.
