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Explosion of unserviceable ammunition and other military items The explosion of the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb. An explosion is a rapid expansion in volume of a given amount of matter associated with an extreme outward release of energy, usually with the generation of high temperatures and release of high-pressure gases. Explosions may also be ...
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.
A dust explosion is the rapid combustion of fine particles suspended in the air within an enclosed location. Dust explosions can occur where any dispersed powdered combustible material is present in high-enough concentrations in the atmosphere or other oxidizing gaseous medium, such as pure oxygen .
Almost all of the nuclear weapons deployed today use the thermonuclear design because it results in an explosion hundreds of times stronger than that of a fission bomb of similar weight. [16] Thermonuclear bombs work by using the energy of a fission bomb to compress and heat fusion fuel.
An explosion is a type ... The term power or performance as applied to an explosive refers to its ability to do work. In practice it is defined as the explosive's ...
A blast wave reflecting from a surface and forming a mach stem. The air burst is usually 100 to 1,000 m (330 to 3,280 ft) above the hypocenter to allow the shockwave of the fission or fusion driven explosion to bounce off the ground and back into itself, combining two wave fronts and creating a shockwave that is more forceful than the one resulting from a detonation at ground level.
Additionally, heat resulting from the fissions that do occur would work against the continued assembly of the supercritical mass, from thermal expansion of the fuel. This failure is called predetonation. The resulting explosion would be called a "fizzle" by bomb engineers and weapon users.
The steam explosion and fires released approximately 5200 PBq, or at least 5 percent of the reactor core, into the atmosphere. [58] The explosion itself resulted in the deaths of two plant workers, while 28 people died over the weeks that followed of severe radiation poisoning. [ 58 ]