For that matter, even the Nagasaki bomb (“Fat Man”) didn’t use Uranium at all - its fuel was Plutonium.
Comment on logs are for quitters
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 6 days agoThose are fission. Fusion bombs don’t fuse uranium. They use a fission bomb to fuse Lithium.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 6 days ago
frezik@midwest.social 6 days ago
Oh, they do, but not as the primary or secondary. You can wrap depleated uranium around the core to capture fast neutrons that are leftover from the rest of the process. Changing the number of layers is how you can dial in a desired yield.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Damnit, you’re right and I’m wrong!
anindefinitearticle@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Fusion bombs use a fission bomb to fuse Hydrogen, which is why they’re called H-bombs.
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Look at all these nuclear scientists on Lemmy.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Sorry I meant Lithium Deuteride.
6Li2H
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 6 days ago
I mean if we really want to be technically accurate here, the lithium is just a moderater for the hydrogen isotopes to fuse.
But for me it gets fuzzy when looking at the reaction.
LiD is 4 protons, 8 neutrons. Add a new neutron, and bam, you have 4 protons and 9 neutrons. But that’s where it gets weird to me. The lithium needs to decay or something into a tritium and dueterium which forces the tritium to fuse with the existing dueterium in the LiD molecule? Clearly the neutron has enough energy to transfer into one of the atoms to increase the chance of tunneling actually occuring.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 6 days ago
The only real purpose of the lithium deuteride is that it’s a dry, shelf-stable, room-temperature fuel. The very first hydrogen “bomb” (actually a building-sized device) used supercooled liquid hydrogen as the fusion fuel, but this was obviously not practical for a deliverable bomb.
feannag@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
How about a nice game of Global Thermonuclear War?