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There is another source of free neutrons that can spoil a fission explosion. All uranium and plutonium nuclei have a decay mode that results in energetic alpha particles. If the fuel mass contains impurity elements of low atomic number (Z), these charged alphas can penetrate the coulomb barrier of these impurity nuclei and undergo a reaction ...
"Thin Man" plutonium gun test casings at Wendover Army Air Field, as part of Project Alberta in the Manhattan Project. " Fat Man " casings can be seen behind them. To work on the plutonium gun design, Oppenheimer assembled a team at the Los Alamos Laboratory that included senior engineer Edwin McMillan and senior physicists Charles Critchfield ...
"Nuketown" is a multiplayer map originating from Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010), a first-person shooter game developed by Treyarch and published by Activision.The map takes place in a nuclear test town in the deserts of Nevada, and is based on real-world nuclear test sites constructed by the United States in the 1950s.
Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons. A ...
The pits of the first nuclear weapons were solid, with an urchin neutron initiator in their center. The Gadget and Fat Man used pits made of 6.2 kg of solid hot pressed plutonium-gallium alloy (at 400 °C and 200 MPa in steel dies – 750 °F and 29,000 psi) half-spheres of 9.2 cm (3.6 in) diameter, with a 2.5 cm (1 in) internal cavity for the initiator.
The odd numbered fissile plutonium isotopes present in spent nuclear fuel, such as Pu-239, decrease significantly as a percentage of the total composition of all plutonium isotopes (which was 1.11% in the first example above) as higher and higher burnups take place, while the even numbered non-fissile plutonium isotopes (e.g. Pu-238, Pu-240 and ...
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A dirty bomb or radiological dispersal device is a radiological weapon that combines radioactive material with conventional explosives. The purpose of the weapon is to contaminate the area around the dispersal agent/conventional explosion with radioactive material, serving primarily as an area denial device against civilians.