how accurate is TV? / TV as a teaching medium?

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ColJack

ColJack

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how accurate do you recon the content of programs are?
I mean from watching various medical dramas over the years I recon I've got a good shot at pulling off a succesful appendectomy or of re-inflating someones collapsed lung with a steak knife and a ball point pen..

there's been enough shows and films showing and describing the basics that anyone could have a good go I recon..

which is what scares me..

take the hiroshima bomb for example, numerous films show it's construction, and many programs describe the problems they had with shock wave timing and the need for plates of various metals to speed up or slow down the shockwaves so they all arrived at the same time..

you'd think that the powers that be would keep details like this from the general public or at least leave out enough crucial information to make it impossible..

with the internet there must be plans out there available for anyone to view...
 
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Making a nuke is incredibly difficult, I would defy anyone with internet knowledge to come even close. Even more prosaic than that, try making a conventional bomb even with full instructions is not that easy.
 
Some in this country seem to manage it, buying stuff from the local garden centre & chemist shop.
 
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seems that I was thinking of the nagasaki bomb ( a plutonium implosion type bomb ), the Hiroshima one was an even simpler shotgun type..

enriched uranium, 2 cores one cylindrical bolted to the nose, the second tubular (so it almost fits over the first ) at the other end of a tube.
use a regular explosive to drive the tube over the core and boom..

of the 64kg of uranium, they think that less than a kilogram actually fissioned and only 0.6g was actually converted into energy..
 
I read somewhere that an American university student actually designed a nuclear weapon as his main thesis. All from information gleaned from the internet and university library. His thesis was impounded by the US government for fear that it could theoretically have been constructed.

By the way ColJack, the weapon your trying to describe only works because the two cores come together in such a way and are compressed by the explosives around them, that they reach critical mass.
 
joinerjohn said:
I read somewhere that an American university student actually designed a nuclear weapon as his main thesis. All from information gleaned from the internet and university library. His thesis was impounded by the US government for fear that it could theoretically have been constructed.

By the way ColJack, the weapon your trying to describe only works because the two cores come together in such a way and are compressed by the explosives around them, that they reach critical mass.
Click to expand...

Is that how you define "The land of opportunity" :eek:
 
joinerjohn said:
By the way ColJack, the weapon your trying to describe only works because the two cores come together in such a way and are compressed by the explosives around them, that they reach critical mass.
Click to expand...

the "shotgun" type nukes only have one explosive and that's the one that propells the outer core down the tube..

the implosion type ( such as the "fat man" nuke dropped on nagasaki ) are the complicated ones and need a neutron source in the center and do indeed ned to be compressed into a critical mass before they work.
 
I have successfully made a duck, shallot & ham pie with the aid of 'Market Kitchen' on the good food channel.

'H' Bombs anyday :D . That recepie took a bit of hard work.

David (Tony to you Joe-90).
 
given that the inspiration for this thread was me watching an episode of "the unit" where they described the general construction of a "shotgun nuke" and how you can dissarm one with a metal saw ( cut the tube in half.. you get a good dose of rads but it can't go off if the 2 halves can't meet.. :) ), then it's a valid argument..
TV gives out too much detail that can be harmfull..
 
Sorry, was just replying to the topic you posted.

I have made a some nice Beef Tostada's (with Beef Ragu) too, due to the factual info on 'the box'.

David.
 
You have to enrich the uranium to 99% to make it weapons grade. You need an atomic pile to do that. I think it extremely unlikely you can puchase several tonnes of Boron rods and carbon bricks without attracting the attention of Special Branch.

Futhermore, handling the enriched uranium sub critical masses (ignore how hot they would be), would give you a lethal dose of radioactivity in about 30 minutes, unless you had the same sort of remote robot assembly systems the americans and russians have.

Plutonium is even worse. Plutonium is possibly the most poisonous substance on the planet, in having just 1 uG of plutonium will ensure with 99% certainty you die of some sort of cancer within months. A couple of hundred uG will kill you within weeks. You will not live to see your plutonium fission device tested.

Also, where are you going to get the necessary plastic high explosive to make an implosion device? You woudl be limited to laterral cylinder detonation devices, and that give syou ten times more problems.

The impact explosion has to be exactly right. Too much you will destroy the mechanism before it goes critical. Too little, the sub critical masses blow apart before critical and produce a squib explosion instead. You would be better using a house as a bomb.

If you ran a length of cast iron drain pipe vertically through a house from basement to loft ( about 50 feet), placed one sub critical mass i nthe bottom of the pipe, then filled the basement with concrete as containment and shielding, then you need to make a 'slug' that will drop down the pipe. The slug needs to be a metre of steel pipe with the other sub critical mass at one end, then the rest of the pipe filled with concrete. itt is slipped into the top of the pipe, and help in place with a 6 inch nail through the pipe. You trigger is a small lump of plastic explosive to blow the nail out, on a time switch.

When it blow, slug drops down and the kinetic energy and mass of the falling slug will keep the two masses together long enough to go critical, and the basement full of set concrete will contain and amplify the explosion due to the neutron slowing of the concrete. Two sub critical masses of about 3.5Kg Uranium should give a yield of about 15 kT.

Thats a LOT easier to build, the only problem is obtaining to hypercritical masses of Uranium. One terrorist group was making a suitcase nuke by recovering the tiny amounts of radioactive Americium 233 from hundreds of smoke alarms, in the hope of making two subcritical masses.

Also, the two japanese bombs both used about 4 Kg sub critical masses. 64 Kg of Uranium or Plutonium would go critical very easily, and as one or even two masses would squib.
 
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