Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A thermonuclear weapon, ... Its temperature soars past 100 million kelvin, ... The fission products of this chain reaction heat the highly compressed (and thus super ...
Energy from a nuclear explosion is initially released in several forms of penetrating radiation. When there is surrounding material such as air, rock, or water, this radiation interacts with and rapidly heats the material to an equilibrium temperature (i.e. so that the matter is at the same temperature as the fuel powering the explosion).
A nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) is a type of thermal rocket where the heat from a nuclear reaction replaces the chemical energy of the propellants in a chemical rocket. In an NTR, a working fluid , usually liquid hydrogen , is heated to a high temperature in a nuclear reactor and then expands through a rocket nozzle to create thrust .
The medical effects of the atomic bomb upon humans can be put into the four categories below, with the effects of larger thermonuclear weapons producing blast and thermal effects so large that there would be a negligible number of survivors close enough to the center of the blast who would experience prompt/acute radiation effects, which were observed after the 16 kiloton yield Hiroshima bomb ...
Log–log plot comparing the yield (in kilotonnes) and mass (in kilograms) of various nuclear weapons developed by the United States.. The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is the amount of energy released such as blast, thermal, and nuclear radiation, when that particular nuclear weapon is detonated, usually expressed as a TNT equivalent (the standardized equivalent mass of trinitrotoluene ...
A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction.The driving reaction may be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion or a multi-stage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion-based weapons have used a fission device to initiate fusion, and a pure fusion weapon remains a hypothetical device.
Diagram of a radioisotope heater unit. A radioisotope heater unit (RHU) is a small device that provides heat through radioactive decay. [1] They are similar to tiny radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG) and normally provide about one watt of heat each, derived from the decay of a few grams of plutonium-238—although other radioactive isotopes could be used.
In 1999, the director of Los Alamos who had presided over its design described it as "the most advanced U.S. nuclear warhead". [4] As of 2021, the latest version is called the W88 ALT 370, [ 5 ] the first unit of which came into production on 1 July, 2021, after 11 years of development. [ 6 ]