this is nothing new, seriously. Why is this even news?
Why did you mark the 60MT part in bold if you are talking about depleted uranium? Adding more deuterium and tritium will increase the power and rack up more megatons. That is the fusion stage. More megatons does not mean more radiation and that Wiki articles are littered with citations. H-bomb aka thermonuclear weapons has no practical limit. Fusion is needed to split the U-238. Yes it produces the most radio active fall out from it but it does not increase the power of it.
And why are you talking about depleted uranium when I am talking about plutonium? The bomb in Nagasaki was a plutonium bomb and did you see what a few kilotons did without depleted uranium?
Because fission of the depleted uranium tamper, which is really just U238 also provides power and fallout. U238 is not normally able to undergo fission but it is considered fertile material. This means that U238 is able to take advantage of the enormous numbers of neutrons produced by the second stage fusion process. When U238 captures a neutron, it decays to Pu239 and then becomes fissile U239. This undergoes fission and provides the power generated by the third stage in a textbook example of a Teller-Ulam multi-stage thermonuclear device. The neutron generation from the fusion reaction and transformation of fertile U238 to fissile Pu239 is the handoff from the second to the third stage. The third stage is an enormous source of power and radioactivity/fallout which is why it was eliminated.
The powdered U238 he was referring to was the tamper. Theoretically, that would have fissioned and not been released into the environment as powdered U-238. The more efficient and better designed the weapon, the more of the tamper would be fissioned and converted to energy instead of being dispersed. For the record, even the Nagasaki Fat Man bomb had a tamper of U238 surrounding the plutonium fuel.
The Tsar bomb was a Fission-Fusion bomb and not a fission-fusion-fission one and that is where the confusion came in. But I still got to know where all that plutonium went to as well as the tritium because it is radio active as well. So clean bomb is a bit of a over statement.
The Tsar bomb was a 2 stage design. Not 3 stage. Pu-239 still was used. Weapon grade plutonium is about 93 percent Pu-239.
How do you make P-239? So no the Fat man bomb did not have a tamper of U-238 it was using weapon grade plutonium. And if you go look up how Pu-239 is made you will see that its made from U-238.
Now this is semantics, but accurately, Tsar Bomba was still considered a 3 stage design. The important detail here is that the third stage was made of lead, which meant it was not meant to fission. It still served as a tamper to the bomb, just not a fissionable tamper.
Yes Fat Man did have a natural uranium tamper, to reflect neutrons back into the fissile pit and improve the efficiency of the reaction. Please do your research.
The plutonium and tritium were the respective fission and fusion fuels and were consumed in the reactions. Clean bomb as far as meaning that fusion which produced the majority of the power does not produce the long lived and dirty pollution products (e.g Cesium-137, Strontium-90 etc...) and fallout that fission does. I recall that there was still nearly 2 megatons produced from just the fission reactions which does make a good amount of fallout. The "clean" characterization is an assessment of the overall pollution/fallout profile of the entire bomb especially when compared to the power it produced.
The most common isotope, plutonium-239, is produced when the most common isotope of uranium, uranium-238, absorbs a neutron and then quickly decays to plutonium. It is this plutonium isotope that is most useful in making nuclear weapons, and it is produced in varying quantities in virtually all operating nuclear reactors. As fuel in a reactor is exposed to longer and longer periods of neutron irradiation, higher isotopes of plutonium build up as some of the plutonium absorbs additional neutrons, creating plutonium-240, plutonium-241, and so on. Plutonium-238 also builds up from a chain of neutron absorptions and radioactive decays starting from uranium-235.
Because of the preference for relatively pure plutonium-239 for weapons purposes, when a reactor is used specifically for creating weapons plutonium, the fuel rods are removed and the plutonium is separated from them after relatively brief irradiation (at low "burnup"). The resulting "weapons-grade" plutonium is typically about 93 percent plutonium-239.
So follow they own advice and do research but please try to understand what you just researched.1943 to 1945 :
Uranium from Canada, Colorado, and the Congo is used in the World War II Atom Bomb Project:
the bulk of the uranium is enriched for use as a nuclear explosive in the Hiroshima bomb;
a large amount of uranium is used as metallic fuel for the world's first reactors; inside each reactor, a fraction of the uranium fuel (less than one percent) is transmuted into plutonium, which is then extracted and used as a nuclear explosive in the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs;
a small amount of polonium extracted from uranium ore is also used, in combination with beryllium, to provide the initial burst of neutrons needed to detonate both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
People actually reply and argue with this LiuKangBakinPie piece of shit? Damn.
According to http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html , which everyone, (including you) is quoting, it was a 3 stage design. The language is very clear.The Tsar bomb was a 2 stage design. Not 3 stage.
The device offically designated RDS-220, known to its designers as Big Ivan, and nicknamed in the west Tsar Bomba (and referred to as the Big Bomb by Sakharov in his Memoirs [Sakharov 1990]) was the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed or detonated. This three stage weapon was actually a 100 megaton bomb design, but the uranium fusion stage tamper of the tertiary (and possibly the secondary) stage(s) was replaced by one(s) made of lead.
Is it possible to build a nuclear firecracker ie: Nuclear M-80. Yield, 8 ounces of TNT.
Plutonium containing between 80 and 93 percent plutonium-239 is referred to as "fuel-grade" plutonium. We are talking about "weapons-grade" plutonium.
excerpted from the US Department of Energy Publication ~
Nonproliferation and Arms Control Assessment
of Weapons-Usable Fissile Material Storage
and Excess Plutonium Disposition Alternatives
(pages 37-39)
January 1997
Canadian Uranium in Bombs
So follow they own advice and do research but please try to understand what you just researched.
And your point is what?? No shit we are talking about weapons grade plutonium. We have been talking about a bomb and not a reactor since the OP posted this thread.
Really? The guy who drew comparisons between Pu240 in nuclear bombs and Santa Claus is still trying to look credible. What of what you posted has to do with anything relevant in this discussion? You are now confusing a reactor and a bomb. Anyone can google "Tsar Bomba" and post quotes from the resulting search, but actually understanding the physics of what you are posting here is a completely separate ballgame. Instead of posting mis-information here, take the time to go and read some real materials (e.g. not wikipedia) and learn something. Come back in a year and necro this thread after some serious reading/studying. Its not even worth my time to respond to this shit any longer.