Nuclear Bomb: How it Works in detail.
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| Nuclear Bomb: How it Works in detail. Atomic vs Hydrogen bomb |
Mankind had never seen anything like it. When it was unleashed on people in an
effort to stop a war, all people saw was a blinding light followed by complete
darkness and destruction. it was August 6 1945. It was the most powerful weapon
ever created by mankind. it's shockwave turned everything in a
one-mile radius into rubble. It unleashed energy and radiation that
killed a hundred and forty thousand people in the industrial city of
Hiroshima Japan.
As powerful as this bomb was, mankind has since invented a weapon
that is hundreds of times more powerful. Today, we have thermonuclear weapons, also
called the hydrogen bomb. To give you an idea of its power, if the original
Hiroshima bomb was dropped in New York City,
It would destroy everything in a one-mile radius. But if a hydrogen bomb was dropped there, heaven forbid, it would not just destroy everything in a one-mile radius,
it would make into rubble everything in a ten-mile radius. This would be a total
calamity.
The world now has over 10,000 such bombs capable of easily destroying
every single person on our planet many times over. What makes these weapons so
powerful? How do they actually work? That's coming up right now.
Fusion
The bomb on Hiroshima released an energy equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. The first hydrogen bomb released the energy equivalent of 10 million tons of TNT.
While the atomic bomb like the one that was dropped on Hiroshima worked on the
principle of releasing energy through the splitting of atoms, also called
fission - see my video on that - a hydrogen bomb does something that
releases even more energy - and that is it fuses atoms together. Fusion is even more
powerful than fission. It is the same process that powers our Sun. And when
fission is combined with fusion in a hydrogen bomb, it creates energy orders
of magnitude higher than fission alone, making the hydrogen bomb hundreds to thousands
of times more powerful than atomic bombs.
How does fusion work? The fusion portion
of the bomb creates energy by combining two isotopes of hydrogen
called deuterium and tritium to create helium. Unlike a natural hydrogen atom
that is made of one electron orbiting around one proton, these isotopes have
extra neutrons in their nuclei. A large amount of energy is released when these
two isotopes fuse together to form helium, because a helium atom has much
less energy than these two isotopes combined. This excess energy is released.
Tritium
One of the main problems with creating the hydrogen bomb was obtaining the
Tritium. Scientists found that they could generate this on the spot inside the
hydrogen bomb with a compound combining Lithium and Deuterium.
The result was a dry, solid, stable powder called Lithium Deuteride. So this is what
most hydrogen bombs today use as their fuel. But how does the process of fusion
actually occur? Ordinarily the nuclei of two atoms cannot be combined because
these nuclei have strong positive electrical charges and repel each other.
This is why scientists chose hydrogen as the best candidate for fusion because it
has only one proton and thus would have less electrical charge than atoms with
multiple protons in their nuclei. But if the nuclei repel each other, how do they
Plasma
fuse? It turns out that if you increase the temperature by millions of degrees,
it is possible to combine nuclei together. As the temperature increases
the atoms speed up. But an extraordinary increase in speed of the atoms is needed
in order to give them a chance to overcome their natural repulsion. The
temperatures needed are astronomical, higher than even that at the center of our
Sun - 100 million degrees Celsius. The center of the Sun is 15 million degrees
Celsius. At this temperature the isotopes become a form of matter called plasma.
This is when the electrons orbiting the nuclei are stripped away from the
nucleus, and the nuclei and electrons are floating around freely in a kind of high
temperature soup.
At this temperature, the nuclei can get very close to each other.
And when they get as close as one times ten to the negative 15 meters apart, then
the strong nuclear force which is present only at very close distances, and
is responsible for keeping protons and neutrons glued together, takes over and
combines the protons and neutrons together to form
a Helium nucleus and a free neutron. But how is a temperature of 100 million
degrees achieved? This is where the fission or atomic bomb inside the
hydrogen bomb enclosure comes into play.
The purpose of the fission bomb is to provide the energy needed to heat up the fusion reaction to this 100 million degrees. So how do they work together? A hydrogen bomb is actually three bombs in one. It contains an ordinary chemical bomb, a fission bomb like the one dropped on Nagasaki, and a fusion bomb. All three work in concert. The chemical bomb
initiates the fission bomb, which initiates the fusion bomb.
To understand how the fission and fusion bombs work together, it's important to understand
how the bomb is put together.
In a ballistic missile the bomb is usually located at the top, inside the cone portion of the missile. Here is where the hydrogen bomb vessel sits. The casing of the bomb is lined with beryllium. This acts as a mirror to reflect the neutrons back into the casing rather than
allowing them to escape the vessel.
A small atomic bomb is located at the top
of the casing. It's shaped like a sphere. The top of the sphere contains
conventional chemical explosives surrounding a sphere of beryllium mirror
casing, inside of which is a small uranium or plutonium sphere, about four
to six inches in diameter. Below this atomic bomb is the hydrogen or fusion
bomb. It consists of a cylinder made of Uranium. The fuel for the fusion reaction,
Lithium Deuteride sits inside the cylinder. And at the core of the cylinder
sits a rod of Plutonium. In between the fission and fusion bombs is an encasing
made of styrofoam. And here is how it all works together. First the fission bomb is
How it all works
detonated by exploding conventional chemical bombs in sequence. This forces
the sphere of plutonium 239 our uranium 235 to implode on itself. The implosion
or compression of this material creates a critical mass which results in a chain
reaction of neutron splitting atoms apart and creating more neutrons, which
split more atoms apart. The chain reaction results in an atomic explosion.
This fission explosion creates high energy gamma rays and x-rays which heat
up the styrofoam and turns it into plasma.
This plasma reflects off the beryllium-lined walls and focuses its energy on the fusion cylinder. These x-rays travel at the speed of light, so they can reach the hydrogen fuel sooner
than the physical shockwave from the atomic bomb. This is important because if
the shock wave reached there first, then the fusion bomb would be blown apart
before it could create fusion reactions. The heat and pressure of the plasma
compresses the fusion cylinder causing the lithium deuteride to react.
This releases Tritium. The Tritium and Deuterium fuse to form helium and more
neutrons. the neutrons cause the Uranium casing and Plutonium rod to undergo more
fission reactions. This causes more pressure on the Lithium Deuteride, not
only from the outside in but also from the inside out.
This produces more fusion which releases more neutrons, which causes more fission. This positive feedback
loop of fission-fusion-fission-fusion reactions goes back and forth until a
huge explosion occurs ripping everything apart. Amazingly all these events happen
in only about 600 billionths of a second, 550 billions of a second for the fission
bomb implosion, and 50 billionths of a second for the fusion bomb. The result
is an immense explosion with a 10 million ton yield, 700 times more
powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. And where does all this energy actually come
Energy conversion
from? Well, if you could weigh all the atoms of the fuel before the explosion
and all the atoms released after the fusion, the sum of all atoms after the
explosion would be less than the sum of all the atoms before the explosion. This
difference in mass is converted to energy using Einstein's famous equation
E equals MC squared.
And exactly how much mass is converted to energy? To give you
an idea, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima converted 700 milligrams of mass into
energy, about 1/3 the mass of a U.S. penny. The total uranium used was 55
pounds. A hydrogen bomb however converts about a kilogram, or two pounds of mass
to pure energy.
But in order to convert this much you have to start with about
140 kilos, or 300 pounds of hydrogen fuel. Only six countries have such bombs -China,
France, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Almost all the
nuclear weapons deployed today are hydrogen bombs because they are much
smaller and lighter, and so can be deployed in intercontinental ballistic
missiles. These things don't just kill, they annihilate. We humans have become
quite efficient at it.
Avinash here if you like our videos andconsider subscribing and ring the bell so that you can be informed when we upload more fascinating videos we make 1 to 2 videos a week we'll see you in the next blog
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