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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 environment of the explosion (e.g. submarine, ground burst, air burst, or exo-atmospheric) determines how much energy is distributed to the blast and how much to radiation. In general, surrounding a bomb with denser media, such as water, absorbs more energy and creates more powerful shock waves while at the same time limiting the area of ...
In a nuclear explosion, the human body can experience varying types of radiation. This radiation can be classified into two groups: initial radiation and residual radiation. Initial radiation is emitted during the initial explosion, which releases short-term radionuclides. The residual radiation is emitted after the initial attack from ...
A nuclear and radiation accident is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as "an event that has led to significant consequences to people, the environment or the facility." Examples include lethal effects to individuals, large radioactivity release to the environment, or a reactor core melt. [6]
Officials used hydrometeorological data to create an image of what the potential nuclear fallout looked like after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. [1] Using this method, they were able to determine the distribution of radionuclides in the surrounding area, and discovered emissions from the nuclear reactor itself. [1]
Nuclear bombs are extremely deadly weapons, but their worst effects are confined to a limited zone. A government safety expert says its entirely possible to survive a nuclear explosion and its ...
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]
About 3.5 tons of plutonium have been released into the environment by atomic bomb tests. While this might sound significant, it has only resulted in a very small dose to the majority of the humans on Earth. Overall the health effects of fission products are far greater than the effects of the actinides released by