Timeline for Can one guy with a duplicator initiate a nuclear apocalypse?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 19, 2019 at 17:09 | comment | added | Alexander | @Harper that still won't work without a moderator. | |
| Sep 19, 2019 at 4:26 | comment | added | Harper - Reinstate Monica | You can still make a pile with natural uranium if it's refined. I don't mean enriched, I just mean take uranium-containing stone that's mostly silica, tungsten and lead, and get rid of all the other crap. That's called refining. Now you have a block of run-of-earth uranium oxide. A big enough stack of that will go critical. However, as the power increases, the pile WILL disassemble itself. Keeping the pile together long enough to do something evil is a hard problem. | |
| Sep 19, 2019 at 0:15 | comment | added | MongoTheGeek | @asgallant chicago pile #1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 just a reactor not a bomb still lots of radiations. | |
| Sep 18, 2019 at 20:42 | comment | added | asgallant | @GiladM I don't remember where I encountered that tidbit; that's why its phrased as a question. It's entirely possible that I am remembering something from a work of fiction. The bomb would still be implosion triggered, so just piling uranium wouldn't do the trick. | |
| Sep 18, 2019 at 19:13 | comment | added | MongoTheGeek | I doubt that just piling natural uranium will result in it being prompt critical resulting in an explosion, my plan was more of a runaway criticality heating and distributing large amounts of radioactive nasty. | |
| Sep 18, 2019 at 14:39 | comment | added | Ventifacts and Yardangs | @asgallant do you have a source for that? I thought that Uranium could not sustain a chain reaction at any scale below an enrichment threshold. | |
| Sep 17, 2019 at 19:54 | comment | added | asgallant | Weren't the original fission bomb designs based on natural Uranium? Before enrichment was solved, the bombs were possible, but infeasibly huge (like, you need a cargo ship to deliver your bomb huge, because literally nothing else has the carrying capacity required). | |
| Sep 17, 2019 at 18:44 | comment | added | Ventifacts and Yardangs | @MongoTheGeek my understanding is that these natural reactions were only able to take place billions of years ago, back when the concentrations of fissile Uranium isotopes were much higher. Nowadays, any natural Uranium will be unable to sustain a chain reaction. | |
| Sep 17, 2019 at 17:10 | comment | added | MongoTheGeek | My thought was along the lines of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor and that eventually you will start converting U238 to fissionable P239 | |
| Sep 17, 2019 at 14:25 | comment | added | Tomáš Zato | Ordinary uranium will not work for this, it's not really radioactive enough to do anything interesting. | |
| Sep 17, 2019 at 3:26 | comment | added | Alexander | @Mark as far as I know, no. You can collect a lot of radioactive byproducts from large amount of uranium, but won't get chain reaction, meaning that "abandoned quarry operation" will look much less dramatic. | |
| Sep 17, 2019 at 0:51 | comment | added | Mark | @Alexander, natural uranium works just fine for making a dirty bomb. You just need a whole lot of it -- on the order of 100-200 metric tons. | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 19:03 | comment | added | Ventifacts and Yardangs | Might wind up asking a spin-off question about it, or maybe figuring out a way for the guy to get half a gram of enriched Uranium in a way that doesn't seem too contrived. At any rate, thanks for telling me how much Uranium a person could buy - I didn't want to look it up and end up on a watch list :P | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 18:54 | comment | added | Ventifacts and Yardangs | I like this a lot, but yeah, @Alexander has a point. I think this plan could last roughly a week before the government shut it down, which amounts to about 2000 tons of material. As for how much of a problem that much natural Uranium in one place would be, I haven't a clue. Definitely an ecological nightmare, but probably not the end of the world. | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 18:47 | comment | added | Alexander | FYI: 7 kg limit of Uranium refers to either natural or depleted Uranium. Without enrichment, this operation is not going to succeed. | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 17:53 | history | answered | MongoTheGeek | CC BY-SA 4.0 |