Re: How much plutonium 320 pounds 700 kg.
From: Steve Harris sbharris_at_ROMAN9.netcom.com (sbharris_at_ix.netcom.com)
Date: 08/24/04
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Date: 24 Aug 2004 16:28:47 -0700
puppet_sock@hotmail.com wrote in message
> Next, 10 kg of Plutonium never made a megaton. Something in
> the range of 30 to 40 kg makes a few tens of kilotons, depending
> on how you arrange things.
> Socks
For the Nagasaki fat man bomb (and also the Trinity gaget), the core
was 6.4 kg of Pu, with a yeild of 20 kT, which gives you about a
fision fraction of 17%. For little boy with yield of 12 kT and a heck
of a lot more U-235 (something like 60 kg) the fission fraction is
down to 2%.
If you look at the "super oralloy" fission bombs which made use of a
composite Pu and U core managed to get fission yields as good as fat
man, then for a yeild of 500 kt (25 times fat man) you need 25 times
the metal, or something on the order of 6.4 x 25 = 160 kg. That would
be Theodore Taylor's monster King Ivy fission bomb. The one they made
in case the H-bomb didn't work. Using uranium in the core allowed them
to construct a much larger core, since fewer stray neutrons generated
by spontaneous fission in U-235 it allows more time during implosian.
However, it's not difficult for me to believe that a much bigger core
would and could give better fission-fraction yields than the somewhat
minimalist Trinity/fat man bombs. After all, the bigger the core, the
better your surface/volume ratio and the larger the fraction of atoms
you should be able to fission. Knowing how scientists do things, I'll
bet you the King-Ivy core was probably exactly 100 kg, and the fission
fraction was therefore 17% x 1.6 = 27%.
SBH
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