Do you actually need conventional explosives? I had the impression all they do is reliably stick the big hunks of radioactive material together in a big bomb that needs to be delivered at high speeds and detonate automatically. Wouldn’t it be enough to quickly shove a cylinder into a bigger core, perhaps with a motor or even a tensioned spring?
That of course doesn’t waive the issue of the amount of fissile material, or the fact it needs to be all put together (you can’t spread it around a vest)
There’s a difference between meltdown, inefficient/low explosion, & efficient high-explosion.
The neutron-emission’s cascading only when the critical-mass is in small-enough a volume,
& the heat it’s producing is making it blow-apart.
( I’ve seen video of 1 million watts of heat being produced by a 1-cubic-metre reactor-core, in a water-cooled reactor… the heat the reaction produces makes the fuel-rods incandescent, or at-least that’s the way it looked, in that video: it may have been Cherenkhov-radiation that I was seeing, or from gamma-rays being converted down to light or something… dunno… )
the more efficient you want the fission-reaction to be, the longer you have to force it together, while it’s blowing-up.
Do you actually need conventional explosives? I had the impression all they do is reliably stick the big hunks of radioactive material together in a big bomb that needs to be delivered at high speeds and detonate automatically. Wouldn’t it be enough to quickly shove a cylinder into a bigger core, perhaps with a motor or even a tensioned spring?
That of course doesn’t waive the issue of the amount of fissile material, or the fact it needs to be all put together (you can’t spread it around a vest)
There’s a difference between meltdown, inefficient/low explosion, & efficient high-explosion.
The neutron-emission’s cascading only when the critical-mass is in small-enough a volume,
& the heat it’s producing is making it blow-apart.
( I’ve seen video of 1 million watts of heat being produced by a 1-cubic-metre reactor-core, in a water-cooled reactor… the heat the reaction produces makes the fuel-rods incandescent, or at-least that’s the way it looked, in that video: it may have been Cherenkhov-radiation that I was seeing, or from gamma-rays being converted down to light or something… dunno… )
the more efficient you want the fission-reaction to be, the longer you have to force it together, while it’s blowing-up.
The explosives are required, for bombs, ttbomk.
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