Nuclear bombs

Until World War 11, there was no commercial production of elemental fluorine. The nuclear bomb project and nuclear energy applications, however, made it necessary to produce large quantities. 

It is illustrated in Section 3.4.4 by tracing the paths for leaking engine compression and applied to fault tree construction for the FFTF reactor Fullwood and Erdmann, 1974). The method involves writing Boolean equations for all paths whereby hazardous material may be released. It is primarily useful for enumerating release paths, but not for what started the release It was used to enumerate the possible paths for stealing nuclear bomb material from a facility. 

Nuclear fission is also involved in nuclear weapons. To create a bomb, the concentration of the isotope uranium-235 must be increased to at least 85 percent from its natural concenti ation of only 0.7 percent. This increase ot concentration is difficult and expensive. In a typical nuclear reactor the uranium-235 concentration in the fuel is only 3 to 4 percent, and hence a nuclear reactor cannot explode like a bomb. In a nuclear bomb... 

The products of nuclear fission reactions are radioactive and disintegrate according to their own time scales. Often disintegration leads to other radioactive products. A few of these secondary products emit neutrons that add to the pool of neutrons produced by nuclear fission. Very importantly, neutrons from nuclear fission occur before those from radioactive decay. The neutrons from nuclear fission are termed prompt. Those from radioacth e decay arc termed delayed. A nuclear bomb must function on only prompt neutrons and in so doing requires nearly 100 percent pure (or Pu) fuel. Although reactor... 

Half-lives span a very wide range (Table 17.5). Consider strontium-90, for which the half-life is 28 a. This nuclide is present in nuclear fallout, the fine dust that settles from clouds of airborne particles after the explosion of a nuclear bomb, and may also be present in the accidental release of radioactive materials into the air. Because it is chemically very similar to calcium, strontium may accompany that element through the environment and become incorporated into bones once there, it continues to emit radiation for many years. About 10 half-lives (for strontium-90, 280 a) must pass before the activity of a sample has fallen to 1/1000 of its initial value. Iodine-131, which was released in the accidental fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, has a half-life of only 8.05 d, but it accumulates in the thyroid gland. Several cases of thyroid cancer have been linked to iodine-131 exposure from the accident. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24 ka (24000 years). Consequently, very long term storage facilities are required for plutonium waste, and land contaminated with plutonium cannot be inhabited again for thousands of years without expensive remediation efforts. 

Most CO and CO2 in the atmosphere contain the mass 12 isotope of carbon. However, due to the reaction of cosmic ray neutrons with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, C is produced. Nuclear bomb explosions also produce C. The C is oxidized, first to CO and then to C02 by OH- radicals. As a result, all CO2 in the atmosphere contains some 0, currently a fraction of ca. 10 of all CO2. Since C is radioactive (j -emitter, 0.156 MeV, half-life of 5770 years), all atmospheric CO2 is slightly radioactive. Again, since atmospheric CO2 is the carbon source for photos5mthesis, aU biomass contains C and its level of radioactivity can be used to date the age of the biological material. 

Atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs resulted in contamination of the surface of the ocean with various isotopes including H, °Sr, Pu, and " °Pu. These isotopes are slowly being mixed through the ocean... 

Nuclear bomb produced " 002 and (as HTO) have been used to describe and model this rapid thermocline ventilation (Ostlund et ah, 1974 Sarmiento et ah, 1982 Fine et al., 1983). For example, changes in the distributions of tritium (Rooth and Ostlund, 1972) in the western Atlantic between 1972 (GEOSECS) and 1981 (TTO) are shown in Fig. 10-10 (Ostlund and Fine, 1979 Baes and Mulholland, 1985). In the 10 years following the atmospheric bomb tests of the early 1960s, a massive penetration of F1 (tritium) into the thermocline has occurred at all depths. Comparison of the GEOSECS and TTO data, which have a 9 year time difference, clearly shows the rapid ventilation of the North Atlantic and the value of such transient" tracers. A similar transient effect can be seen in the penetrative distribution of manmade chlorofluorocarbons, which have been released over a longer period (40 years) (Gammon et al., 1982). 

A nuclear bomb is a terrifying example of the enormous amount of energy released by nuclear fission. A bomb, however, is not the only way to extract the energy produced by nuclear fission. Instead, nuclear fission can be used... 

There are also a number of less continuous but still natural net heat sources e.g. the heat released from volcanoes, earth quakes, and meteorites. There are also some anthropogenic sources form nuclear bomb tests, conventional bombs and explosives. 

A mass of evidence seems to confirm that the mixing rate of radiocarbon in the atmosphere is rapid, and that with respect to its radiocarbon content the atmosphere can be considered as a homogeneous entirety. The contamination of samples with matter from an extraneous source can nevertheless invalidate this assumption. Two types of contamination can be differentiated physicochemical contamination and mechanical intrusion. There are two forms of physicochemical contamination. One is due to the dilution of the concentration of radiocarbon in the atmosphere by very old carbon, practically depleted of radiocarbon, released by the combustion of fossil fuel, such as coal and oil. The other is by the contamination with radiocarbon produced by nuclear bomb tests during the 1950s and later in the twentieth century. The uncertainties introduced by these forms of contamination complicate the interpretation of data obtained by the radiocarbon dating method and restrict its accuracy and the effective time range of dating. 

In the early thirties of the last century Baade and Zwicky conjectured in their studies of supernova explosions that supemovae represent a transition from ordinary stars to compact objects, whose size is an order of magnitude smaller than the size of a white dwarf. At that time it was already known that the atomic nucleus consists of neutrons and it was clear that the density of the remnant objects must be of the same order as the nuclear density. Baade and Zwicky predicted that a supernova explosions will result in objects composed of closely packed neutrons (neutron stars). Prior to the beginning of the second World War (1939) a number of theoretical works by Landau, Oppenheimer, Volkoff and Snider showed, that indeed objects could exist with sizes about 10 km and masses about a solar mass. The density in these objects is about the nuclear saturation density and they basically consist of neutrons with a small amount of protons and electrons. The studies of neutron stars were subsequently stopped most likely due to the engagement of the nuclear scientists in the development of the nuclear bomb both in the West and the East. 

It is highly improbable that a nuclear fission power plant would ever explode like a nuclear bomb, but a loss of coolant accident could result in a melt down condition. In a melt down, a large amount of radiation can be released at ground-level. A nuclear or conventional chemical or steam explosion could disperse much of the radioactive particles into the atmosphere. This is essentially what happened when the Chernobyl gas explosion occurred in the Soviet Union in 1986. 

The scope and scale of pollution from radionuclides has been greatly reduced due to (1) the cessation of aboveground nuclear bomb testing, (2) an international ban on the dumping of nuclear wastes at sea, and (3) better control of discharges from power and fuel reprocessing plants. 

Nowadays, average citizens are somewhat less obsessed with the nuclear threat. Most world leaders likewise seem less preoccupied with the idea that radioactive weapons of mass destraction still pose an imminent danger, although countries such as Iran and North Korea continue to evoke considerable anxiety. Indeed, some unstable nations have stolen or bought the secrets of nuclear bomb making and even brag about their atomic capabilities, hinting darkly that, if provoked, they would not hesitate to use them. 

Strontium-90, a radioactive strontium isotope with a half-hfe of 29 years, is a dangerous fallout source of radiation from atmospheric nuclear bombs. If a person is exposed to it, it will rapidly accumulate in bone tissue and interfere with the production of new red blood cells... 

Because the isotope uranium-235 is fissionable, meaning that it produces free neutrons that cause other atoms to split, it generates enough free neutrons to make it unstable. When the unstable U-235 reaches a critical mass of a few pounds, it produces a self-sustaining fission chain reaction that results in a rapid explosion with tremendous energy and becomes a nuclear (atomic) bomb. The first nuclear bombs were made of uranium and plutonium. Today, both of these fuels are used in reactors to produce electrical power. Moderators (control rods) in nuclear power reactors absorb some of the neutrons, which prevents the mass... 

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