In the video I say "Mass is destroyed" which has led to no small bit of controversy. This is not the standard way to phrase what happens - its more common to say "mass is converted into energy." Why would we not use the word "destroyed"? The main reason, I think, is because it sounds like it contradicts the law of conservation of mass. However, the law of conservation of mass really includes the possibility of interconversion of mass to energy. So where we had mass, it is no more - but this doesn't violate the conservation of mass/energy.
....and, just to be clear, the energy which results in so much destruction is the kinetic energy produced by the fission of an atom and not the energy resulting from matter converting into energy.
@@CRSolarice The fission of an atom releases high energy particles and high energy photons which causes the destruction as you suggest. Of course, you might still ask "from where do these particles/photons get their energy?" In which case the answer is, it was converted from mass.
I suspect the mater may convert into energy, but why were the scientists surprised by the release of more energy than what they expected, when they had calculated less energy being released? Could the fission of the nuclear material also started the material in the center of the core to the fission/fusion state, rather than just the fission state? As it is, a fusion bomb is started with a fission bomb, and that triggers the fusion by the fission compressing the core of the material. Thankfully, the air doesn't start to fuse when it gets irradiated and compressed when the bomb explodes! Or does it?
@@jeffreyyoung4104 That is an incredibly great question. In the Castle Bravo device the big surprise was caused by the Lithium Deuteride. The Lithium first undergoes fission into Tritium and Hydrogen which releases Neutrons and then that Tritium/Hydrogen undergoes Fusion (into Helium and ?) which releases more Neutrons (they had only calculated the neutrons being released due to the fusion process and not the neutrons which were also released by the fission of the Lithium into Hydrogen). I was surprised when I learned this only fairly recently... The reason that the light gases in the atmosphere don't become involved may be due to the idea that the Xrays, heat and radiation are focused towards the fuels and towards the exterior of a nuke these fall off exponentially, as well as the idea that in a nuke the forces of heat, radiation, etc. have a compressive effect from all around the fuel. In the atmosphere outside of the reaction these come only from the direction of the reaction and there is nothing to cause compression because on the other side of the atmospheric gases there isn't any of this so the gases are more or less just pushed away and not compressed, at least not nearly like they are inside of the device (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of these gases, very close to the reaction undergo fusion or fission, at least in trace amounts, although it is probably very negligible and falls off very quickly with distance from the reactions, exponentially that is). I'm very impressed that you had the thoughtfulness to come up with this question, its the first time I ever noticed anyone asking it, at least phrased in such a manner.
@@jeffreyyoung4104 I am not sure, the idea that the atmosphere would catch alight was something that more than a few expected. I suppose it would be possible that some of the very light gases very close to the explosion could becme involved however it is the radiation (Xrays), extreme amount of heat heat and Neutrons that are focused towards the fuel materials that cause the fission/fusion. Just want to mention that the fission fuels are not a gas, as far as I know (like the atmosphere and gases are more easily moved or pushed away) and the the heat, x-rays and neutrons are not as concentrated on the exterior of the device as they are in the center; the further outward you go the less intense all of the radiation, etc. becomes and it is not a linear thing, I believe that it is exponential, similar to gravity. So the radiation, heat and neutrons become much less effective at creating these reactions as the distance from the center increases. I hope this gives you something to think about and as always best regards.
There is a cool story about the 'plastic' used in the making of the bomb. When the bombs were found to be approaching the end of their life and they wanted to overhaul them, the foam used was lost to history and they had to reinvent the foam. The first batches ended up failing due to the foam being too pure! They found an impurity that was needed to make the foam work, and it was added into the foam and then it worked!
I'm not sure I buy the foam part. The xrays heating it up, certainly. But foam means low mass, and to get high pressures you need higher masses. Contrast blowing on something or using a high pressure hose with water. So I don't think its a foam. A plastic, may well be. Next, if you had a working device, would you put out information that was wrong, to put other builders off the trail? Of course.
@@adenwellsmith6908 Back when these bombs were being made originally, it would have been styrofoam, not any other foam. And there was another ingredient used, which is considered top secret to some, and accidentally exposed in the 60s to most of us boomer geeks. The science books distributed in the 60s to schools all over America, had diagrams of atom bombs, with clear overlays to disassemble them. Believe me, I kept my science book for decades, but it still disappeared somehow. And the secret ingredient, is easily found by googling glitter...
@@adenwellsmith6908you’d probably miss out a step, or deliberately factor in a mistake to stop copycats trying to make a nuclear warhead, but it would be accurate enough to make a realistic explanation. This happens with malicious scripts. Info would have a built in error that would be spotted by anyone smart enough with the coding and give them a “valuable” script, while ensuring it wasn’t a copy and paste job some 10 year old could carry out. It would also stop the author from being accused of posting malicious scripts. So I’m sure this happens with nuclear weapons as well.
Hey this is by far the best video I found explaining hydrogen bombs. I watched about 3 minutes of 2 different videos then found this one. First video I felt that actually taught me something. You earned my sub! Cheers from St. Louis Missouri
The nutty part about the nuclear stuff: *EVERYTHING* described in this video happens after the the primary H.E. ignites, but before that chemical explosion blows the hohlraum & bomb casing apart. Even with the explosive lensing, quite a bit of that blast force will travel outward, but what compresses the fission primary is the detonation wave, which is moving at ~5km/s or higher, depending on the particular H.E. being used. But the relativistic speeds at which the nuclear stuff happens easily overtakes the chemical blast. Just bonkers.
Correct, the x-rays and gamma rays from the detonation of the primary stage outrun the shock waves from the high explosives that imploded the plutonium "pit." It is usually hollow and often filled with tritium gas to boost fission and as a byproduct fusion reactions as well during the detonation of the primary stage.
On examination of footage and technical information gama radiation heating lithium 6 and 7 isotopes, with Probobal tungnston mirrors to sheald layer cake or spherical charges which are compressed by nuetron result in fission fusion fission, the reflector casing of the weapon all becoming a plazma in micro seconds it seems.
@@Evan_Bell it's complicated but, is very cool. When a hydrogen bomb explodes, in the first nanosecond, it can very well be the highest temperature in the universe at that specific time. The heat can exceed 180,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So hot that half of the bombs matter, can be departiclized and torn into cosmic energy.
@@dartheater7348 I've studied nuclear weapons for 6 years, designed my own implosion type fission weapon, and currently writing a program that will be able to produce designs in a matter of hours. I know how they work. Rob was talking near gibberish. By my calculations the Fusion fuel temperature in the B-28 peaked at 640 million Fahrenheit . They don't reach 180 million in the first nanosecond, it takes several hundred nanoseconds to reach that temperature if we're using the initiator firing time as the starting point. If you're counting from when the detonators fire, then it's several microseconds. If by "cosmic energy", you mean photons, then half of the bombs's energy isn't converted into photons. At many points inside the weapon, photons do outnumber electrons and ions, and in most places the radiation is in thermodynamic equilibrium with the surrounding matter, meaning the photons and massive particles have the same energy, but this is particle kinetic energy, not counting the rest mass energy of the particles. The values for how much of the rest mass is converted into energy is 0.0826% for U-235 fission, 0.0851% for Pu-239 fission and 0.298% for Li6D fusion. And of course, not all of the fissile, fissionable and fusionable fuel is reacted, and not all of the weapon is fuel. For the B-28, 0.00628% of the total mass of the physics package was converted to energy.
Good introductory video, but I'd like to add some details. Fission devices have produced 0-500kt yields. That 20kt figure is arbitrary. Thermonuclear weapons have produced 1-56800kt. Thermonuclear primaries can be pure uranium, pure plutonium or uranium/plutonium composite. Weapons with cores of all these materials have been produced. Devices have been demonstrated that use pure fusion secondaries. The fusion fuel for all but a very few early devices is lithium deuteride. Lithium isotopic compositions of 7.59% Li6 (natural) to 95% Li6 have been used. The tamper need not be uranium 238. When uranium is used, isotopic compositions of 0.3% U-235 to 37.5% U-235 have been used. Lead, lead-bismuth eutectic and gold are also known to be used. It's not technically accurate to speak of x-rays being reflected off the hohlraum. They penetrate into the hohlraum, deposit their energy, heating up a thin inner layer of the hohlraum, which then re-radiates thermal radiation. The prime mechanism by which the primary's radiant energy is converted into internal energy of the compressed secondary is ablation. A thin layer of the secondary pusher is superheated to a plasma, just as the hohlraum is, this plasma is of higher pressure than the deeper cold pusher and interstage foam plasma, thus it expands. This produces a recoil reaction imploding the secondary. Once the radiation diffusion wave has penetrated some distance (on the order of 1mm) into the pusher, it becomes subsonic and hydrodynamic separation occurs producing a classical shock which initially impulses the secondary pusher, which is then followed by that produced by the ablation pressure. The interstage radiation pressure and that produced by the sparkplug do not compress the fusion fuel simultaenously. The secondary is impulsed by the interstage, then undergoes freefall implosion, compressed the cold fusion fuel, then the sparkplug, initiating fission, which heats the compressed fusion fuel. Initially, the wave from the sparkplug into the fusion fuel will be in the form of a supersonic radiation diffusion wave, thus it will not compress the fusion fuel, I've yet to run the numbers to determine whether hydrodynamic separation ever occurs in the fusion fuel.
Minor nit - When the fissile nucleus splits, it does more than "falls apart". The fission fragments are driven apart by electrostatic repulsion. This happens at relativistic speeds, resulting in millions of degrees of heating.
My physics is rusty, but as I understand it the the mass of an atom is not _exactly_ what you'd expect from adding up the masses of the protons, neutrons and electrons, because some of the mass is tied up in the energy binding the atom together. That small difference varies from one element to another. So when fission occurs, the mass of the products is very slightly different to the mass of the atoms you started with. That difference is released as energy.
On observation of test footage it is noticeable several flashes as the detinator explodes and ignites two stages, quite a long time, in castle bravo and the tizar bomb, hinting at radiation mirrors to elivat temperature,s.
E = mc2 the mass that is so called destroyed is converted to energy, energy is equal to mass times the speed of light ( E = mc2 ) sorry i can't be of more help i am incredibly inebriated at the moment, i hope that can help in some way tho.
The outer shell of thermonuclear weapons could also be made of U-238, which confines the detonation of the primary and secondary stages for just a little longer. In the process, U-238 nuclei capture fast neutrons from the first two stages and fissions itself, greatly magnifying the blast a creating most of the nuclear fallout from the blast.
1:08 I'm pretty sure that nuclear material has to become "super critical" in order to detonate. All nuclear reactors are kept in a controlled critical state to produce heat.
There is no limit to the blast yield of a thermonuclear bomb, it's just a matter of incorporating enough fusion fuel and stages to achieve the intended yield.
Three phase bomb is called "przekładaniec", it has layers. Inside is standard fission material, outside too. That middle layer has pressure of inner and outer layer releasing enormous mass of enrgy, forces it to fission. Squeze fission material by two nuklear loads is enough to make it work. Then goes boom.
Something to add is that there’s tritium gas in the hollow center of the plutonium spark plug which undergoes fusion and when two tritiums atoms fuse, you get helium 4 and two neutrons which are absorbed into the plutonium causing it to undergo fission. Neutrons from the fissioning spark plug are absorbed into lithium 6 where it decays into an alpha particle and and a tritium atom which fuses with the deuterium atom it was bonded making helium 4 and reading neutrons which as you stated are absorbed into the uranium tamper causing it to undergo fission. This energy reader by fissioning tamper accelerates the fusion process.
I'm afraid that's not quite accurate. The temperatures the sparkplug reaches during its firing are insufficient for ignition of tritium-tritium fusion. The boost gas is a >1 D/T stoichiometric mix of deuterium and tritium. Also it is not fission spectrum neutrons from the sparkplug that breed tritium from the lithium. The neutronicity simply isn't high enough to produce a meaningful tritium yield. The sparkplug heats the lithium deuteride to the deuterium ignition temperature, and a deuterium-deuterium fusion burn begins. It is the neutrons from this D-D burn that breed significant quantities of tritium, such that at some point the reactivity of the D-T reaction overtakes that of the D-D reactions.
@@ChrisZoomER That's the only way it can happen. The sparkplug can't reach the temperatures for T-T ignition and it can't yield sufficient neutrons to breed sufficient tritium density to produce a reactivity above that of D-D.
@@ChrisZoomER How is the tritium going to reach that temperature if it doesn't undergo ignition in the first place? Again, it's boosted with a tritium deuterium mix, which achieves ignition at lower temperatures, temperatures that can be achieved by the sparkplug.
This video has personal relevance. Back in 79 the Progressive Magazine published an article on how H-bombs worked. The government went to court and got an order preventing publication - first case of priority restraint of the press. As part of the ACLU’s defense of the Progressive I went to Los Alamos with a friend who was an independent expert and discovered declassified documents from the 1950s that were far more revealing than what the Progressive was going to publish. The discovery of the documents in the public access section of the Los Alamos Lab library blew up the government’s case. It was pretty tense when we bought a copy of the Washington Post at the airport and the front page article about it referenced hit the“FBI investigating violations the Atomic Secrets Act” and “20-life”. A long flight to say the least. In the event nothing happened to us as the documents were clearly declassified. Los Alamos got in trouble and they even had Senate hearings about it. Now this is on RUclips.
The “more detailed information” that you call “classified” is now bouncing around the internet, it turns out having the info be open source helps the public unders how close or far places like Iran and North Korea are from making their own. See Scott Manley’s series on nukes for an examplr
@@piotrd.4850 there is tiny nuke called W-54 which is about 0.19KT that could be used as long as it can generate the 100mill degree temp for the fusion, which it should.
Always wondered how the 2nd stage did not get physically blown up prior to criticality. Then, someone described how the rays travel at the speed and "outran" the physical force of the first stage. Hopefully, that was not an oversimplification.
THANK YOU. Most videos about this topic try to push the belief that FUSION is the destructive force in a thermonuclear weapon by hyping it into some sort of mythological event. This almost always causes people to misunderstand what is happening in a thermonuclear weapon. Its all about the fission, fusion isn't what causes the damage (directly). The fusion reaction cause a release of extra neutrons which cause many more fission reactions before the nuclear fuel material is thrown apart by the explosion. People are wrongly believing that fusion is some sort of ultimate explosive force but it isn't, at least not in thermonuclear weapons. To be certain fusion is an energetic event but in our weapons the energy created by fusion is dwarfed, mightily, by the energy released from the fission component(s). One curious note about the fusion fuel that you touched upon is that it first undergoes the process of fission and then the resulting elements undergo fusion. Its a "two for one" burst of neutrons and extra energy from the same source. I do appreciate your video for being clear and accurate. Skipping the mythological, hype and dumb down parts really "does it" for me. The credit needs to be given.
How are you able to more concretely define "dwarfed"? In the video I watched called "C.7 Calculating energy released in nuclear reactions (HL)" by Mike Sugiyama Jones, it seems that mole-for-mole, fission produces 10x more energy then fusion, but fusion still releases huge quantities of energy. For fusion to be "dwarfed" by fission in a hydrogen bomb, I would infer that there has to be a lot more fissile material than fusionable material present. I get that more neutrons become available for the fission to occur, but is that the only factor?
your post is confusing. There are lots of h bombs with yields in excess of one megaton, but i have never heard of a fission bomb greater than .5 megaton. And the fission bomb in an h bomb is quite small, in the kiloton range. The purpose of the plutonium rod in the LiDu is to serve as sort of anvil against the uranium or lead tamper . Also serves as a source of neutrons to fission the lithium into tritium.compare the net energy of a deuterium/tritium fusion to u235 fission. The rate of fusion is proportional to density and kinetic energy of the reacting particles. In the core of the sun, the density is about 200 times that of water. And fusion in the core of the sun proceeds at a leisurely rate, less energy produced per unit volume than in a fermenting manure pile. Who knows what the density of the burning hydrogen in a bomb is?
@@BjarneLinetsky An H-bomb is a fission device boosted by the release of neutrons by the fusion of Hydrogen or Lithium. There is so much nonsensical word salad in your post that I don't know where to start. The bottom line is that you have no idea what is really going on in an H-bomb, you've just picked words out of some articles somewhere and threw them together in phrases that you feel sound super-scientific and reinforce your sci-fi notions but the truth is that they make no sense, realistically. I'm not going to waste a whole lot of time re-explaining everything here. For an explanation just re-read what I posted or look it up somewhere. You need to research the topic and do it without any preconceived notions as to what a Hydrogen bomb is and how it works. I suggest that you find the information from reputable source and not youtube or Quora.
@@BjarneLinetsky Here is my explanation of what occurs in an H-bomb. (While fusion can result in a very energetic release an H-bomb is not configured to release large amounts of energy directly through the process of fusion. The fusion reaction 'boosts' the fission reactions via a release of neutrons. The huge amount of destructive force produced by an H-bomb is the result of the fission process and the fusion reaction, while relatively energetic, is small in comparison to the fission component. This information is out there for all to see but if you read it with the belief (bias) that fusion in an H-bomb is some sort of heretofore magnificent explosive force that dwarfs anything else then that is what you will incorrectly believe. I know you won't believe me so go ask Neil D'grasse Tyson, he'll explain it to you.). ----------------------------------------------------------- The fusion reaction in a staged nuclear weapon does NOT produce a more destructive reaction than the fission reactions; the fusion reaction only helps to promote a more powerful fission explosion due to the release of a huge number of extra neutrons which is the key to causing fission reactions in large unstable atoms such as Uranium or Plutonium. These 'extra' neutrons help to produce many more fission reactions within the weapon's fuel, that would normally escape the explosion without undergoing the fission process. In other words the only thing that the fusion reaction does is that it provides a huge number of extra neutrons that normally would not be there in order to cause a large number of extra fission reactions, hence causing a larger explosion. The fusion reaction does not produce some sort of mythical explosive force by itself, it only acts as a catalyst to cause a larger number of fission reactions.
@@80sandretrogubbins25 Well, I tend to agree with you. Fusion can be configured to release tremendous amounts of energy and comparatively by mass fusion fuels release more energy. It gets complicated to explain but I follow what you are saying. I'm only trying to explain that in a thermonuclear weapon of 'today' the fusion process is not configured to be the part that creates the huge destructive force, directly that is. It is the fission that creates the 'lions share' of energy boosted by the release of neutrons from the fusion reactions. The fusion component isn't configured or expected to cause the destructive force, directly that is.
I know it’s such a simple concept and a stupid question but the bit that still confuses me is how do you actually compress the plutonium rather than accidentally just blow the core up into tiny pieces? It just seems like you would need such a specific size if explosion and timing to make it all work. But they were barely able to enrich the plutonium back there at any decent rate so finding that specific size / timing would feel either like a shot in the dark or so insanely expensive and time consuming. Or do I just not have the right idea about timing / explosives? I’m probably wrong because the fact they can accidentally compress core halves just by dropping it ontop of the other half and kill everybody in the room.
You’re correct to a certain degree. Only 20 percent of the Trinity device’s plutonium underwent fission-the rest was blown apart. I’m sure they’ve gotten better, especially with modern boosted cores. Very precise timing is involved, but there are three other crucial factors: explosive lensing, the pusher, and the tamper. Lensing directs the explosions to form a spherical shock wave. The tamper, made of U-238 and surrounding the core, has enough mass to delay this shockwave from imploding the core for a few hundred nanoseconds, holding things together long enough to boost efficiency. The pusher, located between the tamper and the explosives, reflects some of the shockwave outward, which extends the time the shockwave takes to propagate, also boosting efficiency.
Simply dropping halves on top of each other is not near the compression necessary to get a nuclear detonation. at worse that would just cause 2 pieces to get super hot and melt down.
Lithium 6 and deuterium of some form.....is the specific fission reaction materials, not sure how deuterium can processed in a solid but the fission works mathematically if I had no errors....
Lithium 6 deuteride is fusion fuel, not fission fuel. Lithium-6 deuteride is an isotopic form of lithium hydride, which is a low density solid ionic compound at room temperature and pressure. It's not too different from say, silicon oxide (sand, glass) or iron oxide (rust) being solid materials incorporating an element that in its free form is a gas.
This may be a stupid question, but how does the actual vessel withstand the fusion pressures and temperatures for long enough to have any decent energy output? Surely the vessel would be destroyed in like 3 nano seconds?
All it needs to do is hold itself together long enough to reradiate x-rays onto the secondary, a process that takes at most a few dozen nanoseconds, after that its job is done.
Everything described in this video happens before the high explosive has the time to blow apart the casing/hohlraum. The HE blast wave travels at 5-20km/s. The nuclear stuff he's talking about here happens at a not-insignificant portion of the speed of light, or AT the speed of light. Relativistic speeds utterly smoke hypersonic shockwaves.
Why don't they surround the lithium or duterium with a number of small U235 devices that would cause a fission bomb implosion of the fusion material? There's still be the concentration of the X-Ray but also the high temperature and pressure needed to bring about fusion? If they surrounded the fission bombs with 6ft thick of steel it works concentrate the x-rays and pressure for the few extra nanoseconds to start the fusion. It would be a heavy bomb but i understand that H-bombs are not nearly as efficient as they could be. A spark plug design seems wasteful of the energy.
6th standard physics/ chemistry: Energy gets transferred through 3 methods. Convection, convention and radiation. The third one is the basis for the true super, because it constitutes the major component in the explosion of a fission bomb.
The “plastic foam” idea was not a proposal but an amateur guess by activist Howard Morland in the 1980s - it has long since been discredited. Trick ideas as to what causes the compression might not be necessary as X-Rays from the primary are so intense they shoot out with the density of lead.
I like how you say "plutonium fission bombs were one of the first nuclear bombs developed, and one of the first ones deployed in WW2." Idk I just find it funny that it was the 2nd of only 2 nuclear bombs deployed in ww2, and no other nuclear bombs were ever used offensively again, so it was the last nuclear bomb ever deployed. I just find humor in strange shit I guess.
A plutonium fission bomb was the first one ever tested, because they weren't sure it was going to work. The gun-type bomb that used HEU (highly-enriched uranium) was pretty much a sure thing, so they never bothered to test it before dropping it on Hiroshima.
@@drtidrow yea I know that. I know the implosion method was unproven until the trinity test. I'm just saying how it sounds funny to me to mention it as "one of the first..." to me that seems like it goes without mentioning that everyone knows that only 2 nuclear bombs were as weapons during WW2, and never again since then, were they used in war. To me it just sounds a little funny talking about it like that.
I HATE the way bad teachers use our and we... Now Our 8:29 bomb is... Now we are ready.... I have nothing to do with it I'm trying to learn it from you so we and our is lame so many crappy teachers
Well, the reason why most bombs are around 200-400kT these days is that somebody figured out that you don't need as much (very expensive) fissile material to destroy a city if you split it up into half a dozen smaller bombs than to have one multi-megaton-yield bomb. Half the explosive force is going to go up away from the target, and a portion of the rest is going to be at such a shallow angle that it won't do much, so only about 45% or so of the yield will be "useful" in destroying the target. Plus, missiles these days are pretty accurate, so you don't need a big warhead to be sure of taking out a point target like a silo.
Fission is not the “falling” apart of atoms, it’s the forceful splitting of atoms within unstable elements and their isotopes, and no energy or mass is destroyed or created in fission or fusion reactions, these weapons are prime examples of mass converting to energy ie E=mC2 Oh and the hydrogen bomb uses lithium deuteride which is a deuterium compound aka hydrogen and serves as a dry fuel that’s stable at room temp and pressure
@@HelloJamesBond layman's terms to describe nuclear fission would bealong the lines of something you may have heard of, ie the splitting of atoms. It's an oversimplified way of describing the ultimate goal of nuclear fission and the fact that splitting anything requires active input, whereas "falling apart" is a passive process. All that's to say his description is inaccurate, wrong, etc... and someone lacking an understanding of a subject should keep their fucking mouths shut about it. There are enough ill informed, willfully ignorant, and plain fucking stupid people out there, that we don't need anyone adding to their ranks
Teknık resım ,tasarım , dizayn öğrenen herkez bu 2d resımlerden bile cok rahat bombanın benzerını ve daha etkın tesırı olan modelini tasarlayabilir 3d metal print metodu ile daha hafif modeli bile yapmak mumkun , Umarım Ai lara bomba tasarlatmaya çalışmazsınız ,neyse biliyorsunuzdur zaten basit birşey
I always thought it was funny that Sakharov used styrofoam to create plasma in his weapon. You can't get away from the stuff, even in doomsday machines!
Incorrect, the lithium nuclei will actually split into He-4 and tritium when struck with high-energy neutrons, like those produced from deuterium fusion. Tritium has a higher reaction rate than deuterium, so it tends to fuse almost immediately after it's created.
i know there is better information in the comments. Most plutonium bombs use also fusion (booster) thats why this "fission and fusion bombs" are not correct there is nearly always both of them involved. There is no way someone could built a bomb with your help, use the information from the comments and make another better one.
Haha great question! First generation fusion bombs used hydrogen, but now typically use the lithium instead. So any fusion bomb is often called a hydrogen bomb, but that seems a little funny. Given this perhaps a better title would be "How to do fusion bombs work?"
@@RealChemistryVideos They generally use enriched lithium-6 deuteride, an isotopic form of lithium hydride, which is an ionic compound of lithium and hydrogen. They also generally use gaseous hydrogen (tritium and deuterium) to boost the primary and sparkplug.
The lines blur hard between chemistry and physics once you leave high school. There are fields like 'nuclear chemistry', and 'physical chemistry'. Quantum mechanics is pretty much joint custody.
Not sure what type of fusion bomb you are talking about, but fusion bombs use a series of reflectors and a fusing fuel usually lithium 6. The uranium-238 is usually the aero body of the MIRV re-entry vehicle. When Edward Teller did his calculations for the fuel required in the form of lithium-6 he considered the overburden of lithium-7 as nothing more than that, ballast. The Castle Bravo blast at Enewitok Atoll was Americas first nuclear accident. Tellers calculations predicted a blast between 4-7 Megatons, Castle Bravo went almost 14-15 Megatons. It seems the lithium-7 was a better fuel than the lithium-6. By this time Edward Tellers security clearance had been revoked and he was not allowed to attend the shot. Instead, he sat in the USGS lab at Berkeley and calculated the yield from what was recorded by the seismographs, time, distance, amplitude, all that good physics stuff. He knew something had gone terrible wrong and that the calculated yield was nowhere near what had actually happened. The before and after pictures of the Enewitok Atoll were evidence of the power of thermonuclear weapons.
Li-7 isn't a better fuel, Li-6 is always more likely to split into tritium. The big problem was that the experiments they used to measure the reaction cross sections for lithium didn't use neutrons of high enough energy to match those generated by D-T fusion, so they missed the fact that Li-7 just needs higher-energy neutrons before it'll split. Far as I know, lithium deuteride used in bombs is enriched to almost pure Li-6, due to it producing a higher yield of tritium overall.
Good grief, why are you showing the badly outdated Teller-Ulam model? Fusion bombs don't look anything like that now, and they haven't for a long time.
Good question! It means it due to the heat and pressure of the prior processes the plutonium in the sparkplug becomes dense enough to achieve a fission chain reaction thus releasing more energy.
This explanation contains the same typical errors as almost all similar materials. Fission only produces a temperature of a few million K, but D-T fusion (and D-D especially!) requires a much higher temperature, about 100 million K. So neither the first stage nor the second stage fission spark plug will NOT produce a high enough temperature to start fusion. Because if that were the case, the Soviets could have easily put together a hydrogen bomb and not tortured themselves with it for years. And they tried it, they put D-Li material in the center of the nuke, around the nuke, etc., but none of it worked because the fission does NOT create enough high temperature to trigger fusion. The principle of the hydrogen bomb is completely different. The spark plug is needed to create high enough energy (1-2 MeV) neutrons to trigger some fusion when they collide with D and Li nucleus (which then produce a high enough energy T nucleus). And the X-ray from the first phase together with the tamper (around the fusion material) are needed to compress the fusion feed material enough so that once the fusion reaction starts, the exothermic runaway can't blow the D-Li-T plasma apart until most of the fusion is complete. (Little Boy, for example, is so poorly efficient because it blows itself apart as soon as the chain reaction starts.)
Do you know the concept of "corss section" and the unit of measurement "barn"? Because you can easily understand it from these. Here is a graph (Wiki) showing the neutron cross section at different energies with light isotopes like D and T: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_cross_section#/media/File:Common_light_element_moderators,_reflectors_and_absorbers.svg
In the video I say "Mass is destroyed" which has led to no small bit of controversy. This is not the standard way to phrase what happens - its more common to say "mass is converted into energy." Why would we not use the word "destroyed"? The main reason, I think, is because it sounds like it contradicts the law of conservation of mass. However, the law of conservation of mass really includes the possibility of interconversion of mass to energy. So where we had mass, it is no more - but this doesn't violate the conservation of mass/energy.
OK so I only watched less than a minute of this because you WRONGLY stated "MASS IS DESTROYED". The law of conservation of mass states "matter can neither be created or destroyed".
wait real talk though, if we're talking a neutron hitting a single atom does that qualify as chemistry? where does the limit of chemistry begin pointless question I know
@@oteragard8077 Actually that's what im saying in the end biology and chemistry are just physics because breaking the reaction down into the smallest piece it's always a physical explanation. I really can't tell you tho where you could say chemistry starts. Maybe in the creation of isotopes is the "smallest" part of chemistry?
4:12 interesting thing to say, since another kind of terrorists already have built nuclear bombs and they already have used/tested it twice on heavily populated areas in 1945.
The sun has fusion occurring, like the bomb, but unlike fission it is not really a chain reaction. Not a nuclear chain reaction anyway, like fission is.
In the video I say "Mass is destroyed" which has led to no small bit of controversy. This is not the standard way to phrase what happens - its more common to say "mass is converted into energy."
Why would we not use the word "destroyed"? The main reason, I think, is because it sounds like it contradicts the law of conservation of mass. However, the law of conservation of mass really includes the possibility of interconversion of mass to energy. So where we had mass, it is no more - but this doesn't violate the conservation of mass/energy.
....and, just to be clear, the energy which results in so much destruction is the kinetic energy produced by the fission of an atom and not the energy resulting from matter converting into energy.
@@CRSolarice The fission of an atom releases high energy particles and high energy photons which causes the destruction as you suggest. Of course, you might still ask "from where do these particles/photons get their energy?" In which case the answer is, it was converted from mass.
I suspect the mater may convert into energy, but why were the scientists surprised by the release of more energy than what they expected, when they had calculated less energy being released?
Could the fission of the nuclear material also started the material in the center of the core to the fission/fusion state, rather than just the fission state?
As it is, a fusion bomb is started with a fission bomb, and that triggers the fusion by the fission compressing the core of the material.
Thankfully, the air doesn't start to fuse when it gets irradiated and compressed when the bomb explodes! Or does it?
@@jeffreyyoung4104 That is an incredibly great question. In the Castle Bravo device the big surprise was caused by the Lithium Deuteride. The Lithium first undergoes fission into Tritium and Hydrogen which releases Neutrons and then that Tritium/Hydrogen undergoes Fusion (into Helium and ?) which releases more Neutrons (they had only calculated the neutrons being released due to the fusion process and not the neutrons which were also released by the fission of the Lithium into Hydrogen). I was surprised when I learned this only fairly recently... The reason that the light gases in the atmosphere don't become involved may be due to the idea that the Xrays, heat and radiation are focused towards the fuels and towards the exterior of a nuke these fall off exponentially, as well as the idea that in a nuke the forces of heat, radiation, etc. have a compressive effect from all around the fuel. In the atmosphere outside of the reaction these come only from the direction of the reaction and there is nothing to cause compression because on the other side of the atmospheric gases there isn't any of this so the gases are more or less just pushed away and not compressed, at least not nearly like they are inside of the device (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of these gases, very close to the reaction undergo fusion or fission, at least in trace amounts, although it is probably very negligible and falls off very quickly with distance from the reactions, exponentially that is). I'm very impressed that you had the thoughtfulness to come up with this question, its the first time I ever noticed anyone asking it, at least phrased in such a manner.
@@jeffreyyoung4104 I am not sure, the idea that the atmosphere would catch alight was something that more than a few expected. I suppose it would be possible that some of the very light gases very close to the explosion could becme involved however it is the radiation (Xrays), extreme amount of heat heat and Neutrons that are focused towards the fuel materials that cause the fission/fusion. Just want to mention that the fission fuels are not a gas, as far as I know (like the atmosphere and gases are more easily moved or pushed away) and the the heat, x-rays and neutrons are not as concentrated on the exterior of the device as they are in the center; the further outward you go the less intense all of the radiation, etc. becomes and it is not a linear thing, I believe that it is exponential, similar to gravity. So the radiation, heat and neutrons become much less effective at creating these reactions as the distance from the center increases. I hope this gives you something to think about and as always best regards.
There is a cool story about the 'plastic' used in the making of the bomb.
When the bombs were found to be approaching the end of their life and they wanted to overhaul them, the foam used was lost to history and they had to reinvent the foam. The first batches ended up failing due to the foam being too pure! They found an impurity that was needed to make the foam work, and it was added into the foam and then it worked!
I'm not sure I buy the foam part. The xrays heating it up, certainly. But foam means low mass, and to get high pressures you need higher masses. Contrast blowing on something or using a high pressure hose with water. So I don't think its a foam. A plastic, may well be.
Next, if you had a working device, would you put out information that was wrong, to put other builders off the trail? Of course.
@@adenwellsmith6908 Back when these bombs were being made originally, it would have been styrofoam, not any other foam. And there was another ingredient used, which is considered top secret to some, and accidentally exposed in the 60s to most of us boomer geeks. The science books distributed in the 60s to schools all over America, had diagrams of atom bombs, with clear overlays to disassemble them. Believe me, I kept my science book for decades, but it still disappeared somehow. And the secret ingredient, is easily found by googling glitter...
@@adenwellsmith6908you’d probably miss out a step, or deliberately factor in a mistake to stop copycats trying to make a nuclear warhead, but it would be accurate enough to make a realistic explanation. This happens with malicious scripts. Info would have a built in error that would be spotted by anyone smart enough with the coding and give them a “valuable” script, while ensuring it wasn’t a copy and paste job some 10 year old could carry out. It would also stop the author from being accused of posting malicious scripts. So I’m sure this happens with nuclear weapons as well.
@@moiraatkinson exactly. The polystyrene is one of them. Quantities of material another. Solid pip I would put as a third
Was this the "Fog Bank" they had such a hard time making?
Hey this is by far the best video I found explaining hydrogen bombs. I watched about 3 minutes of 2 different videos then found this one. First video I felt that actually taught me something. You earned my sub! Cheers from St. Louis Missouri
The nutty part about the nuclear stuff: *EVERYTHING* described in this video happens after the the primary H.E. ignites, but before that chemical explosion blows the hohlraum & bomb casing apart. Even with the explosive lensing, quite a bit of that blast force will travel outward, but what compresses the fission primary is the detonation wave, which is moving at ~5km/s or higher, depending on the particular H.E. being used. But the relativistic speeds at which the nuclear stuff happens easily overtakes the chemical blast. Just bonkers.
Correct, the x-rays and gamma rays from the detonation of the primary stage outrun the shock waves from the high explosives that imploded the plutonium "pit." It is usually hollow and often filled with tritium gas to boost fission and as a byproduct fusion reactions as well during the detonation of the primary stage.
Thanks for the good idea
On examination of footage and technical information gama radiation heating lithium 6 and 7 isotopes, with Probobal tungnston mirrors to sheald layer cake or spherical charges which are compressed by nuetron result in fission fusion fission, the reflector casing of the weapon all becoming a plazma in micro seconds it seems.
Don’t try this at home kids 😆
@@robhavock9434 Near gibberish.
What exactly are you trying to say?
@@Evan_Bell it's complicated but, is very cool. When a hydrogen bomb explodes, in the first nanosecond, it can very well be the highest temperature in the universe at that specific time. The heat can exceed 180,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So hot that half of the bombs matter, can be departiclized and torn into cosmic energy.
@@dartheater7348 I've studied nuclear weapons for 6 years, designed my own implosion type fission weapon, and currently writing a program that will be able to produce designs in a matter of hours.
I know how they work. Rob was talking near gibberish.
By my calculations the Fusion fuel temperature in the B-28 peaked at 640 million Fahrenheit . They don't reach 180 million in the first nanosecond, it takes several hundred nanoseconds to reach that temperature if we're using the initiator firing time as the starting point. If you're counting from when the detonators fire, then it's several microseconds.
If by "cosmic energy", you mean photons, then half of the bombs's energy isn't converted into photons.
At many points inside the weapon, photons do outnumber electrons and ions, and in most places the radiation is in thermodynamic equilibrium with the surrounding matter, meaning the photons and massive particles have the same energy, but this is particle kinetic energy, not counting the rest mass energy of the particles.
The values for how much of the rest mass is converted into energy is 0.0826% for U-235 fission, 0.0851% for Pu-239 fission and 0.298% for Li6D fusion. And of course, not all of the fissile, fissionable and fusionable fuel is reacted, and not all of the weapon is fuel. For the B-28, 0.00628% of the total mass of the physics package was converted to energy.
hats of man. such technicality at such ease.
Good introductory video, but I'd like to add some details.
Fission devices have produced 0-500kt yields. That 20kt figure is arbitrary.
Thermonuclear weapons have produced 1-56800kt.
Thermonuclear primaries can be pure uranium, pure plutonium or uranium/plutonium composite. Weapons with cores of all these materials have been produced.
Devices have been demonstrated that use pure fusion secondaries.
The fusion fuel for all but a very few early devices is lithium deuteride. Lithium isotopic compositions of 7.59% Li6 (natural) to 95% Li6 have been used.
The tamper need not be uranium 238.
When uranium is used, isotopic compositions of 0.3% U-235 to 37.5% U-235 have been used. Lead, lead-bismuth eutectic and gold are also known to be used.
It's not technically accurate to speak of x-rays being reflected off the hohlraum. They penetrate into the hohlraum, deposit their energy, heating up a thin inner layer of the hohlraum, which then re-radiates thermal radiation.
The prime mechanism by which the primary's radiant energy is converted into internal energy of the compressed secondary is ablation.
A thin layer of the secondary pusher is superheated to a plasma, just as the hohlraum is, this plasma is of higher pressure than the deeper cold pusher and interstage foam plasma, thus it expands. This produces a recoil reaction imploding the secondary. Once the radiation diffusion wave has penetrated some distance (on the order of 1mm) into the pusher, it becomes subsonic and hydrodynamic separation occurs producing a classical shock which initially impulses the secondary pusher, which is then followed by that produced by the ablation pressure.
The interstage radiation pressure and that produced by the sparkplug do not compress the fusion fuel simultaenously. The secondary is impulsed by the interstage, then undergoes freefall implosion, compressed the cold fusion fuel, then the sparkplug, initiating fission, which heats the compressed fusion fuel.
Initially, the wave from the sparkplug into the fusion fuel will be in the form of a supersonic radiation diffusion wave, thus it will not compress the fusion fuel, I've yet to run the numbers to determine whether hydrodynamic separation ever occurs in the fusion fuel.
👏👏👏👏👏👏
I was waiting for someone to mention lithium deuteride
@Apollion Sacrez Leonard His* engineers already know all this.
This comment gave more info than the video. Probably a pentagon insider 🙈
With is freefall implosion 🤔
Thank you so much, i just bought mine and i was trying to figure out how it works!
@rob1248996
Yeah, and if you're trying to smuggle it, don't hide it in your "prison wallet".
Minor nit - When the fissile nucleus splits, it does more than "falls apart". The fission fragments are driven apart by electrostatic repulsion. This happens at relativistic speeds, resulting in millions of degrees of heating.
Great video and explanation, without any background in this i could understand it perfectly. Cheers
Very easy to take in the information, unlike other videos.
0:44 How is mass destroyed?
My physics is rusty, but as I understand it the the mass of an atom is not _exactly_ what you'd expect from adding up the masses of the protons, neutrons and electrons, because some of the mass is tied up in the energy binding the atom together. That small difference varies from one element to another. So when fission occurs, the mass of the products is very slightly different to the mass of the atoms you started with. That difference is released as energy.
@@epiendless1128 Oh I got it, thanks
On observation of test footage it is noticeable several flashes as the detinator explodes and ignites two stages, quite a long time, in castle bravo and the tizar bomb, hinting at radiation mirrors to elivat temperature,s.
Forever
E = mc2 the mass that is so called destroyed is converted to energy, energy is equal to mass times the speed of light ( E = mc2 ) sorry i can't be of more help i am incredibly inebriated at the moment, i hope that can help in some way tho.
The outer shell of thermonuclear weapons could also be made of U-238, which confines the detonation of the primary and secondary stages for just a little longer. In the process, U-238 nuclei capture fast neutrons from the first two stages and fissions itself, greatly magnifying the blast a creating most of the nuclear fallout from the blast.
1:08 I'm pretty sure that nuclear material has to become "super critical" in order to detonate. All nuclear reactors are kept in a controlled critical state to produce heat.
The singular of nuclei is nucleus.
There is no limit to the blast yield of a thermonuclear bomb, it's just a matter of incorporating enough fusion fuel and stages to achieve the intended yield.
Three phase bomb is called "przekładaniec", it has layers. Inside is standard fission material, outside too. That middle layer has pressure of inner and outer layer releasing enormous mass of enrgy, forces it to fission. Squeze fission material by two nuklear loads is enough to make it work. Then goes boom.
Something to add is that there’s tritium gas in the hollow center of the plutonium spark plug which undergoes fusion and when two tritiums atoms fuse, you get helium 4 and two neutrons which are absorbed into the plutonium causing it to undergo fission. Neutrons from the fissioning spark plug are absorbed into lithium 6 where it decays into an alpha particle and and a tritium atom which fuses with the deuterium atom it was bonded making helium 4 and reading neutrons which as you stated are absorbed into the uranium tamper causing it to undergo fission. This energy reader by fissioning tamper accelerates the fusion process.
I'm afraid that's not quite accurate.
The temperatures the sparkplug reaches during its firing are insufficient for ignition of tritium-tritium fusion. The boost gas is a >1 D/T stoichiometric mix of deuterium and tritium.
Also it is not fission spectrum neutrons from the sparkplug that breed tritium from the lithium. The neutronicity simply isn't high enough to produce a meaningful tritium yield. The sparkplug heats the lithium deuteride to the deuterium ignition temperature, and a deuterium-deuterium fusion burn begins. It is the neutrons from this D-D burn that breed significant quantities of tritium, such that at some point the reactivity of the D-T reaction overtakes that of the D-D reactions.
@@Evan_Bell That's one way it could happen
@@ChrisZoomER That's the only way it can happen. The sparkplug can't reach the temperatures for T-T ignition and it can't yield sufficient neutrons to breed sufficient tritium density to produce a reactivity above that of D-D.
@@Evan_Bell It doesn't have to, the sparkplug is boosted with tritium which can reach those temperatures. (300M Kelvin)
@@ChrisZoomER How is the tritium going to reach that temperature if it doesn't undergo ignition in the first place?
Again, it's boosted with a tritium deuterium mix, which achieves ignition at lower temperatures, temperatures that can be achieved by the sparkplug.
I read long ago that Fe (Iron) is the most stable nucleus, so fusing towards Fe or splitting down to it is the way to go. Yields may vary.
best explanation i could find, thanks
This video has personal relevance. Back in 79 the Progressive Magazine published an article on how H-bombs worked. The government went to court and got an order preventing publication - first case of priority restraint of the press. As part of the ACLU’s defense of the Progressive I went to Los Alamos with a friend who was an independent expert and discovered declassified documents from the 1950s that were far more revealing than what the Progressive was going to publish. The discovery of the documents in the public access section of the Los Alamos Lab library blew up the government’s case. It was pretty tense when we bought a copy of the Washington Post at the airport and the front page article about it referenced hit the“FBI investigating violations the Atomic Secrets Act” and “20-life”. A long flight to say the least. In the event nothing happened to us as the documents were clearly declassified. Los Alamos got in trouble and they even had Senate hearings about it. Now this is on RUclips.
WOW
The explanation makes these weapons all the more terrifying.
I liked the graph at the end
The “more detailed information” that you call “classified” is now bouncing around the internet, it turns out having the info be open source helps the public unders how close or far places like Iran and North Korea are from making their own. See Scott Manley’s series on nukes for an examplr
perhaps there is a toroidal pressure & heat wave initiated by the fission that sends the spark plug into an oscillating cascade.
I have a question, is the weak nuclear force related to beta decay? Thank you!
Yes it is! The weak nuclear force is the one responsible for all radioactive decay
The "yellow foam" is actually called "FOGBANK" and it's clear. It's highly classified but more than likely used as a plasma to aid in reaction.
Ahh those BOSCH Plutonium spark plugs! I'm gonna swap my NGK Iridiums out for some of those.
I believe Little Boy was deployed first. Subscribed anyway.
For thermonuclear weapon which is used uranium or plutonium
Awesome video!
Thank you for explaining this in a very accessible way. Really enjoyed it :-)
we're beating oppenheimer with this one $$
How many minimum KT fission bomb does a fusion bomb require? I have been looking for that data and found no reference
Probably any will do, single kiloton range. Once fusion-fission-fusion is going
@@piotrd.4850 that's what I have been thinking but unable to confirm. Probably is classified info.
@@piotrd.4850 there is tiny nuke called W-54 which is about 0.19KT that could be used as long as it can generate the 100mill degree temp for the fusion, which it should.
Always wondered how the 2nd stage did not get physically blown up prior to criticality. Then, someone described how the rays travel at the speed and "outran" the physical force of the first stage. Hopefully, that was not an oversimplification.
THANK YOU. Most videos about this topic try to push the belief that FUSION is the destructive force in a thermonuclear weapon by hyping it into some sort of mythological event. This almost always causes people to misunderstand what is happening in a thermonuclear weapon. Its all about the fission, fusion isn't what causes the damage (directly). The fusion reaction cause a release of extra neutrons which cause many more fission reactions before the nuclear fuel material is thrown apart by the explosion. People are wrongly believing that fusion is some sort of ultimate explosive force but it isn't, at least not in thermonuclear weapons. To be certain fusion is an energetic event but in our weapons the energy created by fusion is dwarfed, mightily, by the energy released from the fission component(s).
One curious note about the fusion fuel that you touched upon is that it first undergoes the process of fission and then the resulting elements undergo fusion. Its a "two for one" burst of neutrons and extra energy from the same source.
I do appreciate your video for being clear and accurate. Skipping the mythological, hype and dumb down parts really "does it" for me. The credit needs to be given.
How are you able to more concretely define "dwarfed"? In the video I watched called "C.7 Calculating energy released in nuclear reactions (HL)" by Mike Sugiyama Jones, it seems that mole-for-mole, fission produces 10x more energy then fusion, but fusion still releases huge quantities of energy. For fusion to be "dwarfed" by fission in a hydrogen bomb, I would infer that there has to be a lot more fissile material than fusionable material present. I get that more neutrons become available for the fission to occur, but is that the only factor?
your post is confusing. There are lots of h bombs with yields in excess of one megaton, but i have never heard of a fission bomb greater than .5 megaton.
And the fission bomb in an h bomb is quite small, in the kiloton range. The purpose of the plutonium rod in the LiDu is to serve as sort of anvil against the uranium or lead tamper . Also serves as a source of neutrons to fission the lithium into tritium.compare the net energy of a deuterium/tritium fusion to u235 fission. The rate of fusion is proportional to density and kinetic energy of the reacting particles. In the core of the sun, the density is about 200 times that of water. And fusion in the core of the sun proceeds at a leisurely rate, less energy produced per unit volume than in a fermenting manure pile. Who knows what the density of the burning hydrogen in a bomb is?
@@BjarneLinetsky An H-bomb is a fission device boosted by the release of neutrons by the fusion of Hydrogen or Lithium. There is so much nonsensical word salad in your post that I don't know where to start. The bottom line is that you have no idea what is really going on in an H-bomb, you've just picked words out of some articles somewhere and threw them together in phrases that you feel sound super-scientific and reinforce your sci-fi notions but the truth is that they make no sense, realistically. I'm not going to waste a whole lot of time re-explaining everything here. For an explanation just re-read what I posted or look it up somewhere. You need to research the topic and do it without any preconceived notions as to what a Hydrogen bomb is and how it works. I suggest that you find the information from reputable source and not youtube or Quora.
@@BjarneLinetsky Here is my explanation of what occurs in an H-bomb. (While fusion can result in a very energetic release an H-bomb is not configured to release large amounts of energy directly through the process of fusion. The fusion reaction 'boosts' the fission reactions via a release of neutrons. The huge amount of destructive force produced by an H-bomb is the result of the fission process and the fusion reaction, while relatively energetic, is small in comparison to the fission component. This information is out there for all to see but if you read it with the belief (bias) that fusion in an H-bomb is some sort of heretofore magnificent explosive force that dwarfs anything else then that is what you will incorrectly believe. I know you won't believe me so go ask Neil D'grasse Tyson, he'll explain it to you.).
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The fusion reaction in a staged nuclear weapon does NOT produce a more destructive reaction than the fission reactions; the fusion reaction only helps to promote a more powerful fission explosion due to the release of a huge number of extra neutrons which is the key to causing fission reactions in large unstable atoms such as Uranium or Plutonium. These 'extra' neutrons help to produce many more fission reactions within the weapon's fuel, that would normally escape the explosion without undergoing the fission process. In other words the only thing that the fusion reaction does is that it provides a huge number of extra neutrons that normally would not be there in order to cause a large number of extra fission reactions, hence causing a larger explosion. The fusion reaction does not produce some sort of mythical explosive force by itself, it only acts as a catalyst to cause a larger number of fission reactions.
@@80sandretrogubbins25 Well, I tend to agree with you. Fusion can be configured to release tremendous amounts of energy and comparatively by mass fusion fuels release more energy. It gets complicated to explain but I follow what you are saying. I'm only trying to explain that in a thermonuclear weapon of 'today' the fusion process is not configured to be the part that creates the huge destructive force, directly that is. It is the fission that creates the 'lions share' of energy boosted by the release of neutrons from the fusion reactions. The fusion component isn't configured or expected to cause the destructive force, directly that is.
I know it’s such a simple concept and a stupid question but the bit that still confuses me is how do you actually compress the plutonium rather than accidentally just blow the core up into tiny pieces? It just seems like you would need such a specific size if explosion and timing to make it all work. But they were barely able to enrich the plutonium back there at any decent rate so finding that specific size / timing would feel either like a shot in the dark or so insanely expensive and time consuming. Or do I just not have the right idea about timing / explosives? I’m probably wrong because the fact they can accidentally compress core halves just by dropping it ontop of the other half and kill everybody in the room.
You’re correct to a certain degree. Only 20 percent of the Trinity device’s plutonium underwent fission-the rest was blown apart. I’m sure they’ve gotten better, especially with modern boosted cores. Very precise timing is involved, but there are three other crucial factors: explosive lensing, the pusher, and the tamper. Lensing directs the explosions to form a spherical shock wave. The tamper, made of U-238 and surrounding the core, has enough mass to delay this shockwave from imploding the core for a few hundred nanoseconds, holding things together long enough to boost efficiency. The pusher, located between the tamper and the explosives, reflects some of the shockwave outward, which extends the time the shockwave takes to propagate, also boosting efficiency.
Simply dropping halves on top of each other is not near the compression necessary to get a nuclear detonation. at worse that would just cause 2 pieces to get super hot and melt down.
Uranium tamper is best than lead tamper in that it increases fission reactors making the weapon more thermonuclear
Lithium 6 and deuterium of some form.....is the specific fission reaction materials, not sure how deuterium can processed in a solid but the fission works mathematically if I had no errors....
Lithium 6 deuteride is fusion fuel, not fission fuel.
Lithium-6 deuteride is an isotopic form of lithium hydride, which is a low density solid ionic compound at room temperature and pressure.
It's not too different from say, silicon oxide (sand, glass) or iron oxide (rust) being solid materials incorporating an element that in its free form is a gas.
This may be a stupid question, but how does the actual vessel withstand the fusion pressures and temperatures for long enough to have any decent energy output? Surely the vessel would be destroyed in like 3 nano seconds?
Which vessel? The radiation case? The ablation wave burns through it in a few hundred nanoseconds.
All it needs to do is hold itself together long enough to reradiate x-rays onto the secondary, a process that takes at most a few dozen nanoseconds, after that its job is done.
Everything described in this video happens before the high explosive has the time to blow apart the casing/hohlraum. The HE blast wave travels at 5-20km/s. The nuclear stuff he's talking about here happens at a not-insignificant portion of the speed of light, or AT the speed of light. Relativistic speeds utterly smoke hypersonic shockwaves.
Why don't they surround the lithium or duterium with a number of small U235 devices that would cause a fission bomb implosion of the fusion material? There's still be the concentration of the X-Ray but also the high temperature and pressure needed to bring about fusion? If they surrounded the fission bombs with 6ft thick of steel it works concentrate the x-rays and pressure for the few extra nanoseconds to start the fusion. It would be a heavy bomb but i understand that H-bombs are not nearly as efficient as they could be. A spark plug design seems wasteful of the energy.
we should do the same thing for fusion power. and a tokamak
6th standard physics/ chemistry: Energy gets transferred through 3 methods. Convection, convention and radiation. The third one is the basis for the true super, because it constitutes the major component in the explosion of a fission bomb.
Great video thanks man
So using foam which is a petrochemical derivative means that the H bomb is really a souped up petrol bomb.
Thank you for this 🙂
I'll start thinking about how you creat fission-fusion bomb more powerful than Tsar Bomba
The “plastic foam” idea was not a proposal but an amateur guess by activist Howard Morland in the 1980s - it has long since been discredited. Trick ideas as to what causes the compression might not be necessary as X-Rays from the primary are so intense they shoot out with the density of lead.
be the first guy to make a video on the ablation pressure theory! no one ever goes into detail on how exactly the secondary is compressed
It is ablation recoil.
Old tech..when do we get anti matter bombs?
I like how you say "plutonium fission bombs were one of the first nuclear bombs developed, and one of the first ones deployed in WW2."
Idk I just find it funny that it was the 2nd of only 2 nuclear bombs deployed in ww2, and no other nuclear bombs were ever used offensively again, so it was the last nuclear bomb ever deployed. I just find humor in strange shit I guess.
A plutonium fission bomb was the first one ever tested, because they weren't sure it was going to work. The gun-type bomb that used HEU (highly-enriched uranium) was pretty much a sure thing, so they never bothered to test it before dropping it on Hiroshima.
@@drtidrow yea I know that. I know the implosion method was unproven until the trinity test. I'm just saying how it sounds funny to me to mention it as "one of the first..." to me that seems like it goes without mentioning that everyone knows that only 2 nuclear bombs were as weapons during WW2, and never again since then, were they used in war. To me it just sounds a little funny talking about it like that.
I HATE the way bad teachers use our and we... Now Our 8:29 bomb is... Now we are ready.... I have nothing to do with it I'm trying to learn it from you so we and our is lame so many crappy teachers
thanks this will help me with my school project!!!!!
What exactly is your project?...
@@sleeper5905 uhhhhh... it will get me a good grade!
@@babyyoda1091 yeah man totally trust ya
I feel like a cluster of green bombs would work better than the tsar bomb or castle bravo
Well, the reason why most bombs are around 200-400kT these days is that somebody figured out that you don't need as much (very expensive) fissile material to destroy a city if you split it up into half a dozen smaller bombs than to have one multi-megaton-yield bomb. Half the explosive force is going to go up away from the target, and a portion of the rest is going to be at such a shallow angle that it won't do much, so only about 45% or so of the yield will be "useful" in destroying the target. Plus, missiles these days are pretty accurate, so you don't need a big warhead to be sure of taking out a point target like a silo.
Fission is not the “falling” apart of atoms, it’s the forceful splitting of atoms within unstable elements and their isotopes, and no energy or mass is destroyed or created in fission or fusion reactions, these weapons are prime examples of mass converting to energy ie E=mC2
Oh and the hydrogen bomb uses lithium deuteride which is a deuterium compound aka hydrogen and serves as a dry fuel that’s stable at room temp and pressure
The guy was obviously explaining in layman's terms. So people like me can understand.
@@HelloJamesBond layman's terms to describe nuclear fission would bealong the lines of something you may have heard of, ie the splitting of atoms. It's an oversimplified way of describing the ultimate goal of nuclear fission and the fact that splitting anything requires active input, whereas "falling apart" is a passive process. All that's to say his description is inaccurate, wrong, etc... and someone lacking an understanding of a subject should keep their fucking mouths shut about it. There are enough ill informed, willfully ignorant, and plain fucking stupid people out there, that we don't need anyone adding to their ranks
Teknık resım ,tasarım , dizayn öğrenen herkez bu 2d resımlerden bile cok rahat bombanın benzerını ve daha etkın tesırı olan modelini tasarlayabilir 3d metal print metodu ile daha hafif modeli bile yapmak mumkun , Umarım Ai lara bomba tasarlatmaya çalışmazsınız ,neyse biliyorsunuzdur zaten basit birşey
I always thought it was funny that Sakharov used styrofoam to create plasma in his weapon. You can't get away from the stuff, even in doomsday machines!
Brilliant
If you want to build your own hydrogen bomb, Amazon has bulk plutonium and some lithium products. 🙂
Tsar Bomba is terrifying and unbelievable.
The 1950s British Royal Air Force called their Hydrogen bombs 'Buckets of instant sunshine'.
Chemistry is insane
Underlying all of that is physics. Physics is even more insane than chemistry.
Thanks for the tutorial I just made a hydrogen bomb and shows my friends at school
Lithium doesn't become hydrogen, it's a compound of Li6D2 (lithium deuteride) and a carrier for deuterium.
Incorrect, the lithium nuclei will actually split into He-4 and tritium when struck with high-energy neutrons, like those produced from deuterium fusion. Tritium has a higher reaction rate than deuterium, so it tends to fuse almost immediately after it's created.
plutonium spark plug is made by using plutonium foam.
The lithium undergoes fision by all of the neutrons.
i know there is better information in the comments. Most plutonium bombs use also fusion (booster) thats why this "fission and fusion bombs" are not correct there is nearly always both of them involved. There is no way someone could built a bomb with your help, use the information from the comments and make another better one.
But of a misnomer calling it a hydrogen bomb …. seems from this that hydrogen plays just a small part. Thermonuclear describes it better.
Lithium deuteride I believe - not just lithium.
why did i think an atomic bomb was more devastating than a hydrogen bomb? 😅
Iterrestinging
where is the hydrogen ?
Haha great question! First generation fusion bombs used hydrogen, but now typically use the lithium instead. So any fusion bomb is often called a hydrogen bomb, but that seems a little funny. Given this perhaps a better title would be "How to do fusion bombs work?"
@@RealChemistryVideos They generally use enriched lithium-6 deuteride, an isotopic form of lithium hydride, which is an ionic compound of lithium and hydrogen.
They also generally use gaseous hydrogen (tritium and deuterium) to boost the primary and sparkplug.
Interesting video but I have to point out that this is not chemistry, it's physics.
The lines blur hard between chemistry and physics once you leave high school.
There are fields like 'nuclear chemistry', and 'physical chemistry'.
Quantum mechanics is pretty much joint custody.
03:15 😆👍
Not sure what type of fusion bomb you are talking about, but fusion bombs use a series of reflectors and a fusing fuel usually lithium 6. The uranium-238 is usually the aero body of the MIRV re-entry vehicle. When Edward Teller did his calculations for the fuel required in the form of lithium-6 he considered the overburden of lithium-7 as nothing more than that, ballast. The Castle Bravo blast at Enewitok Atoll was Americas first nuclear accident. Tellers calculations predicted a blast between 4-7 Megatons, Castle Bravo went almost 14-15 Megatons. It seems the lithium-7 was a better fuel than the lithium-6. By this time Edward Tellers security clearance had been revoked and he was not allowed to attend the shot. Instead, he sat in the USGS lab at Berkeley and calculated the yield from what was recorded by the seismographs, time, distance, amplitude, all that good physics stuff. He knew something had gone terrible wrong and that the calculated yield was nowhere near what had actually happened. The before and after pictures of the Enewitok Atoll were evidence of the power of thermonuclear weapons.
Li-7 isn't a better fuel, Li-6 is always more likely to split into tritium. The big problem was that the experiments they used to measure the reaction cross sections for lithium didn't use neutrons of high enough energy to match those generated by D-T fusion, so they missed the fact that Li-7 just needs higher-energy neutrons before it'll split.
Far as I know, lithium deuteride used in bombs is enriched to almost pure Li-6, due to it producing a higher yield of tritium overall.
alright so theres this game powder toy, and i wanted to make a reallistic hydrogen bomb in it, thanks!
Of COURSE we’re not GLAD about this.
Do you think we citizens are insane?
Tsar Bomba, roughly 57,000 kilotons, 1963.....
Good grief, why are you showing the badly outdated Teller-Ulam model? Fusion bombs don't look anything like that now, and they haven't for a long time.
"Ignites the plutonium spark plug". What the hell does that mean?
Good question! It means it due to the heat and pressure of the prior processes the plutonium in the sparkplug becomes dense enough to achieve a fission chain reaction thus releasing more energy.
"a" is the *singular* indefinite article, whereas "nuclei" is a *plural* noun. There's no such thing as "a nuclei".
Yeah that's true.
All happens in less than a second
This explanation contains the same typical errors as almost all similar materials. Fission only produces a temperature of a few million K, but D-T fusion (and D-D especially!) requires a much higher temperature, about 100 million K.
So neither the first stage nor the second stage fission spark plug will NOT produce a high enough temperature to start fusion.
Because if that were the case, the Soviets could have easily put together a hydrogen bomb and not tortured themselves with it for years. And they tried it, they put D-Li material in the center of the nuke, around the nuke, etc., but none of it worked because the fission does NOT create enough high temperature to trigger fusion.
The principle of the hydrogen bomb is completely different. The spark plug is needed to create high enough energy (1-2 MeV) neutrons to trigger some fusion when they collide with D and Li nucleus (which then produce a high enough energy T nucleus). And the X-ray from the first phase together with the tamper (around the fusion material) are needed to compress the fusion feed material enough so that once the fusion reaction starts, the exothermic runaway can't blow the D-Li-T plasma apart until most of the fusion is complete.
(Little Boy, for example, is so poorly efficient because it blows itself apart as soon as the chain reaction starts.)
Please explain how neutrons push the D+T nuclei together to initiate fusion. By what force do they act on the D+T to push them together?
Do you know the concept of "corss section" and the unit of measurement "barn"? Because you can easily understand it from these. Here is a graph (Wiki) showing the neutron cross section at different energies with light isotopes like D and T: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_cross_section#/media/File:Common_light_element_moderators,_reflectors_and_absorbers.svg
Nuclei is the plural. One nucleus fuses with another nucleus. Small detail, kind of important.
I got lost, why is called Hydrogen bomb? I did not see that element inside the bomb.
deuterium and tritium are hydrogens
Bro really said it destroys mass
In the video I say "Mass is destroyed" which has led to no small bit of controversy. This is not the standard way to phrase what happens - its more common to say "mass is converted into energy."
Why would we not use the word "destroyed"? The main reason, I think, is because it sounds like it contradicts the law of conservation of mass. However, the law of conservation of mass really includes the possibility of interconversion of mass to energy. So where we had mass, it is no more - but this doesn't violate the conservation of mass/energy.
OK so I only watched less than a minute of this because you WRONGLY stated "MASS IS DESTROYED". The law of conservation of mass states "matter can neither be created or destroyed".
It’s conservation of mass-energy.
Me beeing a smartass: This isn't real chemistry actually nothing is because it's all physics if you see were im coming from
Very well, henceforth my channel shall be known as "Real (applied) Physics"
wait real talk though, if we're talking a neutron hitting a single atom does that qualify as chemistry? where does the limit of chemistry begin
pointless question I know
@@oteragard8077 Actually that's what im saying in the end biology and chemistry are just physics because breaking the reaction down into the smallest piece it's always a physical explanation. I really can't tell you tho where you could say chemistry starts. Maybe in the creation of isotopes is the "smallest" part of chemistry?
@@PolitischeImmunität something like isotopes yea
4:12 interesting thing to say, since another kind of terrorists already have built nuclear bombs and they already have used/tested it twice on heavily populated areas in 1945.
ever read skeletons across the desert?
@@a-fl-man640 ur pfp look like my ex
@@Tacticalerth ur pfp looks like me
Hm? Not tested, used operationally, and not terrorist but open state military.
you're only 99.9% wrong. try ten MILLION tons.
Learn to read before you correct. It says "kilotons"
don't try this at home
You're telling me that hydrogen bombs uses a similar chain reaction that the sun uses.💀
The sun has fusion occurring, like the bomb, but unlike fission it is not really a chain reaction. Not a nuclear chain reaction anyway, like fission is.
The fusion fuel is lithium deuteride, not lithium
When i was a kid I was fascinated with nuclear physics and everytime i used a knife i was afraid I'd split an atom and blow myself up.
Haha! Be careful!
That hole is real and it reacts differently on land just a hot spot for 2 to 3 months look in the mirror 🪞