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Intense thermal radiation at the hypocenter forms a nuclear fireball which, if the explosion is low enough in altitude, is often associated with a mushroom cloud. In a high-altitude burst where the density of the atmosphere is low, more energy is released as ionizing gamma radiation and X-rays than as an atmosphere-displacing shockwave.
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 ...
A government safety expert says its entirely possible to survive a nuclear explosion and its aftereffects. ... though thermal radiation can last several seconds and inflict severe burns miles from ...
Compared to a pure fission bomb with an identical explosive yield, a neutron bomb would emit about ten times [9] the amount of neutron radiation. In a fission bomb, at sea level, the total radiation pulse energy which is composed of both gamma rays and neutrons is approximately 5% of the entire energy released; in neutron bombs, it would 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.
The 1986 nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl was categorized as a Level 7 accident, which is the highest possible ranking on the INES scale, due to widespread environmental and health effects and "external release of a significant fraction of reactor core inventory". [57]
In the initial microseconds after the explosion, a fireball is formed around the bomb by the massive numbers of thermal x-rays released by the explosion process. These x-rays cannot travel very far in standard atmosphere before reacting with molecules in the air , so the result is a fireball that rapidly forms within about 10 metres (33 ft) in ...
Photograph of the Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test explosion in course of Operation Dominic on July 9, 1962. (US Govt. Defense Threat Reduction Agency/Wikimedia Commons) On the night of ...