The Controversy of a Potential Hafnium Bomb 499
deglr6328 writes "Physics Today has a report detailing the surprisingly heated controversy surrounding the usually sober science of nuclear isomers (the Washington Post has run a less scientifically rigorous version). Since the 70's it has been known that the specific "m2" isomer of Hafnium-178 has an extraordinarily long half life of 31 years (nuclear isomers usually have half-lives on orders of pico or nanoseconds) and on decaying, emits high energy gamma rays at ~2.5 Mev. The prospect of energy storage and rapid release in Hf-178 for the puropse of creating large energy stores, bombs and even exotic gamma ray lasers did not escape the interest of Reagan era Star Wars researchers and was seriously studied for a time during SDI's heyday, but was eventually abandoned after being considered unfeasible. Then, in 1999, Carl Collins at the Univ. of Texas Center for Quantum Electronics reported inducing energy release from Hf-178 by bombarding a sample with X-rays (from a dental machine no less). Immediately, comments about the article were submitted, pointing out inconsistencies with basic nuclear theory and the controversy has only grown since then, with claims and counter-claims of flawed experimental design, incompetence and irrational theories in feuds reminiscent of the cold fusion debacle of the late 80's. It's seeming more unlikely as the arguments drag on, but if a Hafnium bomb could be built, it is thought that a golf ball sized chunk could produce the energy equivalent of 10 tons of conventional explosives."
Power, Science and Death (Score:4, Insightful)
What if journalists and scientists agree to only discuss the *positive* uses of scientific invention? That way, some uneducated terrorists from The Great Wherever won't get new ideas using Google keyword searches like "explosives", "bombs", "nukes". You know the phrase, When in Rome; I think it could apply to science! If we just conceal the potentials for violence, we may avoid these practices somewhat. But much of the scientific community has a love affair with death, it seems. Why? The death-dealing potential of any scientific invention is proportionately equivalent to the fundraising influence of said project; yet science should be a noble pursuit, IMHO, not a monetary one. Sadly, the two (money and science) are inseparable with the high cost of equipment, facilities and so forth, compounded by the need for science by the powerful, as a method of retaining power and building power. One day, it's going to be a lot simpler.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I had the exact same thought that day. I always expected the Big Hit to come if they got their hands on a loose nuke. One of the few comforts of the days after 9/11 was that it seemed like that they had tipped their hand too early -- that now we would go after them with Extreme Prejudice and grind al Qaeda into dust before they ever got that chance.
Of course, that was all before we decided to drop everything and go after Saddam Hussein... now we've given them a nice breather to start working on fi
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:4, Interesting)
So far there's only been jingoistic kneejerk reaction a la "let's kill every last one of 'em".
What comes to those nukes "they" don't have, we're barely half a century into the nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction era. The US has an arsenal of some 7,000 nuclear warheads - all far more powerful than those deployed against the two japanese cities - capable of hitting any and all targets around the world in just minutes. In addition to the US, Russia, China and even UK are all either occupying their neighbours or invading some distant foreign country "pre-emptively". All these security council seat holding nuclear states are acting against basic humanitarian principles, simply because they currently can. On a mutual "wink & nod" basis. All that matters is business, acquisition of foreign resources and plain old generating of patriotic fever. In none of these four aggressive states (although the UK isn't yet a lost cause) are the people actively organizing themselves to stop these practises which are the root cause of "terrorism" (aka "fight for freedom").
50-60 years is a very short time in the timescale of human civilization. In another generation or two the people fighting foreign invasions and occupations may well be capable of building true WMDs and delivering them to capital cities, along with ultimatums to pull out or else... Will the political leaders of that time be capable of realizing and correcting the root causes of such desperate measures, or will they still be stuck to the current "nuclear superpowers can do anything they wish" doctrine of today?
In my opinion, all actions, including those against foreign people, should pass the simple test of "would I mind someone else doing that to me?".
Re:Power, Science and Complete Freakin' Ignorance (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep in mind the plurality of perspective, and that families in Iraq and Afghanistan doubtfully shrug off the death of a family member by saying, "Oh well, too bad your father was collateral damage to the freedom bringers." Instead they might view a wa
Re:Power, Science and Complete Freakin' Ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't keep shooting the messengers with this totalitarian "either you're with us or you're against us" war cry. Read a few books about the history (up to current times) of islamic countries, preferably those without obvious political bias, and a pattern emerges. Over the last few hundred years and in particular in the 1900s most islamic countries were occupied and humiliated by the western superpowers of the period. Since oil became the strategic commodity, Middle-East (where all the holiest sites of islam are located) has been under extreme manipulation by the US and UK in particular.
Try imagining god-fearing Americans experiencing such occupation, control and manipulation of the United States, its culture and resources, by some islamic superpower and you might find a few Americans starting to hate their new overlords. Some might even take up arms as a last resort.
Countries cherishing peaceful coexistance and without imperial urges tend not to be hated by anyone. Democracy does not mean one country imposing its values upon other nations with very different culture and history.
Btw, nowhere have I advocated hate or violence, on the contrary. I simply understand the reasons for such anger and frustration which very sadly manifests itself in violent struggle. I also find it interesting and strangely appropriate that you would rename "Death" in the title into "Complete Freakin' Ignorance".
Re:Power, Science and Complete Freakin' Ignorance (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, you can try to put those words in my mouth but you'll end up looking like an ass doing so. And where the heck did this "Don't keep shooting the messengers with this totalitarian "either you're with us or you're against us" war cry" crap come from? Every incident cited was a terrorist act, notably incited by an "Al-Qaeda like" group. At no time did I even imply lumping the rest of the Arabic world with these savages as you so blindly assume. If it really makes you feel better to assign a racial profile, you can lump members of the IRA to the same catagory; good wholesome white european stock. Don't miss the sarcasm now.
And guess what? Once they start targeting the civilan populace with their military actions, why they hate no longer matters because obviously the only meaningful thing you can do for them is die. If that's the case, I have no problems.
You can attempt to load all the middle easts problems on the evil western super powers as well, but it doesn't fly. Hey, i'll be happy to admit the US has made it's share of forgeign policy mistakes in the region, but they, nor the others hardly share all the blame. As you mentioned, oil is perhapse the worlds number one most valuable commodity, But for such a massive revenue generating resource, the Middle East (with very few exceptions) is surprisingly poor. It's people are supressed. In poverty. You make it sound like everybody is just robbing them blind when they are actually making billion. You make it sound like they are helpless when they wield considerable sway on the world economy. Speaking of which, you're right, LET'S brush up on history and current events and remember the 70s oil crisis. Or how gas is pushing $2 a gallon today because of OPEC's manuvering. And that's just off the very top of my head.
Honestly, if the Middle East is a terrorist cest pool, I have to say it's rulers share an equal, if not greater share in creating that situation. Being oppressed by the Evil Western Empire is an excuse that ceased being viable after the 1960s, especially with the wealth and opportunity they have had access to all this time.
"Why" just doesn't rest soley in the hands of foreigners here.
Re:Power, Science and Complete Freakin' Ignorance (Score:4, Interesting)
When I read this part of your comment, I had to think of George Bush Sr. and Jr.; it was like an eye-opener. I think the Bushes are totalitarian, and that's never been a good thing, historically.
There was a video game designed that allows you to get a sense of terrorism. You're overlooking an Arabic city/village and you play the role of the US gov't. You have to kill the terrorists by sending cruise missiles. But what happens when you send one is the pure genius of the video game designer. Each time a bomb explodes and kills anyone, more and more terrorists spring up. Anyone who mourns the death of their relatives, friends, families, neighbours, will become a terrorist.
When I saw that, it became obvious that there is no way to defeat terrorism, but time itself; time and healthy foreign policy.
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:2)
While building an atomic bomb is not that hard, there are parts that would take quite a bit of work to perfect. Such as making sure the shockwave reached the core from the explosive charges at the same time. If you are off by a nanosecond from any of the charges....no joy.
Making an H bomb is even harder. Unless they purchase one the only nuke they will likely ever use is a dirty bomb.
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:4, Interesting)
Go check out the satellite pictures of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan pre-November, 2001, and notice how similar they look, from a distance, to Los Alamos circa late 1944.
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:5, Insightful)
a) most of the effort (by faaar most of it) went into enriching Uranium and making Plutonium. The effort expended to do that involved the largest industrial project in the world at the time. I once heard that a large part of the silver in the Fort Knox was melted to make electromagnetic coils for the enrichment process.
Of course, that effort has been expended and the world is now full of Plutonium and they could buy some. Interetingly, btw, one country nobody moans about who certainly has more than enough Plutonium on hand to build lots of nuclear devices is Japan. They certainly have the expertise too.
b) The two bombs were pretty large. Ok, you could park one on a container ship and float it into New York Harbour or detonate it in San Franciso Bay or in the Thames estuary but nobody is going to carry one of those 1940's devices around just like that.
Anyways, the difficulty does not lie in building the device, the difficulty lies in making an actualy deployable weapon.
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:4, Informative)
One evil genius and a small team of good technicians could do it, given the plutonium. A basic weapon would not need to be all that much bigger than the plutonium core, depending on how fast the detonation velocity of the conventional explosive is. The yield-enhancement features which make the thing much bigger would not be too important to a terrorist. In fact, a low explosive yield, tons rather than kilotons, of TNT equivalent, might be of more use to a terrorist, AFAIK the fall-out from unreacted plutonium etc would be very much worse, and the area might be uninhabitable for a very long time. Apparently there was minimal fallout in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, people were mostly injured or killed by radiation absorbed by their bodies in the few microseconds of the blast, although the horrific deaths are probably continuing to this day. I strongly suspect that a low-yield weapon in a modern city would kill a lot more people, maybe a few hundred by blast and direct radiation, but a million might inhale plutonium dust before they could be evacuated, all of them would die, mostly of lung cancer.
However,if you want to get it past radiation detectors, you have to do a lot more, although AFAIK most of the output from the plutonium, and probably the polonium in the initiator, is alpha and easily stopped.
But, my guess is that an inexperienced team who could get sufficient plutonium might try a cylindrical configuration, it might be even easier to get the simulations correct, and it might fit more easily in a briefcase, but it would use more material.
As computers are widespread, and everything you need to know to build a weapon is published (why that was ever allowed, I don't understand!), the only means of control is to restrict the circulation of plutonium. It makes me sick to think that enough for maybe 50 or 100 weapons has simply been allowed to go missing over the years. Much of it might simply be lost, not in the hands of the wrong people, but where is it, and who is it polluting?
I would be even more worried if large amounts of U235 went missing, an idiot could make a uranium bomb using published information, nothing remotely high-tech is required, but that one would be heavy. Even worse, a suicidal maniac with 2 pieces of U235 could create a "fizzle" with no extra hardware, it would kill a lot of people if used in a crowded place such as a city. Note that the Hiroshima bomb was untested, they knew it must work, even in 1945, with no simulation. The test at Alamogordo was for the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki.
BTW you are right about the silver in Fort Knox, but it got recycled afterwards, and was used because of a wartime shortage of copper. I don't think a terrorist would go that route, they would not need a uranium enrichment plant for a plutonium weapon, AFAIK plutonium is "relatively" easily separated from used reactor fuel rods by a chemical process. But, stealing used fuel rods would be suicidal, and it would need very elaborate robotic handling to be able to do the processing. I think that any makeshift processing facility would leak so much radiation that it would soon be discovered.
I think that society as a whole needs to think about installing many more radiation detectors (they can be cheap and unobtrusive) so that unauthorised movements of radioactive materials will be spotted. They will also help prevent accidents such as the one in the US some years ago when a cobalt source was melted d
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:3, Interesting)
But I truly like the idea of these. I can't imagine any argument against them, and for once, it might be a good use of my tax dollars. Why the hell aren't they putting these at every street corner?
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't know much about nukes, do you? Nuclear landmines, nuclear artillery shells, and nuclear short-range surface-to-surface rockets were all developed during the Cold War to be used defensively in the possibility of a Russian attack. An airburst weapon does amazing things to enemy tanks, tr
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, 'cause I've heard it took about 90 PhD level physicists [childrenof...roject.org], many of which were Nobel Prize recipiants.
Maybe you're confusing the real Manhattan Project with the movie "The Manhattan Project" [imdb.com]?
Go check out the satellite pictures of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan pre-November, 2001, and notice how similar they look, from a distance, to Los Alamos circa late 1944.
Go check out the satellite pictures of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan pre-November, 2001, and notice how similar they look to a generic group of buildings [globalsecurity.org]!
=Smidge=
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:4, Insightful)
Security through obscurity?
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:4, Funny)
let me guess, you have a degree in humanities?
don't take it out on scientists just because you wasted the best years of your life.
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy fuck. It's obvious. We'll get both of them to sit down and have a gentleman's agreement over tea!
Jesus! We've been going at this all wrong! Maybe we can get the Israelis and Palestinians to sit down and agree to only say nice things about each other, too! Surely if Sharon and Arafat can sit down in the same room and not blow each other's heads off, they all can agree to get along! We'll surely turn things around there yet!
Would you like a cookie, too?
As for you...
This makes sense until you have that "eureka" epiphany moment when you realise that the quiet geeky white men in their labs who squander billions of public funds to come up new and exotic ways to kill people in the name of patriotism are the 'uneducated terrorists'. None of this shit would exist if they didn't make such a focused effort to invent it.
I call bullshit. The science and engineering of weapons development isn't something that's reserved for discovery by your gov't bankrolled, morally corrupt, mad scientists. If "they" don't do it, someone else will.
Wouldn't the world be a different place if the Soviet Union had dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, rather than the US....
What, too old school for you? Well, you might have heard about the, you know, planes that were crashed into the WTC. Some pretty fucking basic weapons development there!
That you hold the feet of the discoverers of principles to the same fire as the fucktards that decided to play cruise missile with passenger planes is what's retarded. Christ. The myopia astounds me.
TFOAE
Re:Power, Science and Death (Score:4, Insightful)
Those people, and others, are exactly why the world is what it is, and why the rest of us feel that we need to be armed and dangerous. Hell, I'm armed and dangerous because I don't want to let some *American* fuckwit think he can walk into my home with impunity and take what's mine or rape my women, or threaten me with impunity.
I understand what you are saying, but it's a seriously naive viewpoint. I just hope it doesn't bite you someday.
The solution is not "lighten up" the solution is to be armed, dangerous and vigilant. Thou shalt not fuck with me, because I am covered in spikes and will hurt you if you try to bite me.
As long as the world is the way it is, there will be people who think the way I do. Thinking that your fellow humans, or the world, will change simply because peace and fellowship is a good idea (it is!) is a dangerously naive viewpoint. It's nice to think that way - while I'm not religious, I pray, in my own way, for that kind of peace everyday - but I'm not fool enough to think that it'll happen in a few generations, or even in hundreds of generations. Even if it did, it might transform humankind into something that stagnates uncontrollably...
SB
What is Hafnium? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What is Hafnium? (Score:2)
Well, ticked-offedness is a two-way street.
A little dangerous... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm assuming they'll not be using this material to make golf balls...
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A little dangerous... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A little dangerous... (Score:2)
Re:A little dangerous... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, the term is a misnomer, because the intelligence community mis-translated "Backpack Nuke" into "Suitcase Nuke."
KGB documents indicate that the Soviet Union kept one such device in the basement of the Soviet Embassy in DC to use as a decapitation weapon in the event of nuclear hostilities.
Suitcase nuke, in any case, refers simply to a small nuclear weapon theoretically made man portable, or at least small enough to easily secure within a car's trunk. The United States produced a fair number of these weapons, though they were never fashioned (to the best of my knowledge) into a form intended for covert deployment. The most famous such miniaturized nuclear weapon was the Davy Crocket [3ad.us], a low yield nuclear weapon designed for battlefield deployment in Germany in the event of a Soviet tank invasion of Europe.
Of course, for a halfnium suitcase nuke to be built you'd need a compact X-ray source that could discharge a fair quantity of X-ray's before being blown apart by the halfnium discharge, in otherwords you'd need a fission bomb... which kind of invalidates the entire point.
Re:A little dangerous... (Score:3, Informative)
Regretably Mr. Sidey's insight is 2nd hand, he relates a discussion he had with Kennedy on the topic.
I've seen other references in print, but nothing I can turn up on line.
If you find anything else on the topic please let me know.
Re:Doom's day machine? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can say this.
The fear of Soviet Missiles in Cuba was not that they could strike at US cities. Soviet strikes on our cities were fairly unlikely as those would typicaly be targets of a second strike.
The Cuban Missiles, however, could wipe out many US bomber bases before bombers could get aloft. This, in turn, devalues the US deterant, which made a preemptive strike by the Soviets more likely.
A bomb in DC, if it did not have much of a chance of stoping a retalitory US strike, does not pose the same threat. In short, while a lot of people die, the Soviets still have a really good reason not to set it off.
The problem with this argument is that the Soviets clearly thought that such a weapon would prevent a US retalitory strike because it has little point otherwise. Reality is not what matters here, but perception. If the Russians thought it would prevent a retalitory strike than the US had to treat it as a destabilizing influence.
I wish I could give you a better answer.
I was watching Voyager the other day (Score:4, Insightful)
But anyway, the crew had just found out about a so-called "Omega particle". The particle contained as much energy in one molecule of it as a neutron star had in its entirety.
Eventually they found a race of aliens who had been able to replicate the particle as well as contain it somewhat. Somewhat, because by the time Voyager got there the particle had escaped and blown up the laboratory.
Since this particle could be used for ultimate evil by anyone who had the predilection to use it in such a way, Starfleet HQ had deemed it illegal and set up regulations that required the immediate destruction of the particle if encountered.
The problem is that the energy from even a single molecule of the stuff could provide enough energy to sustain the life of a planet for hundreds of thousands of years.
So I look at this debate over the efficacy of the Hafnium bomb and wonder to myself why it is that humans have this innate need to develop weapons that possess this much power. Why do we see the drawbacks to new technology faster than the benefits? If the Hafnium technology could provide us with such a cheap power source that lasted generations, it makes sense to pursue a course of action that allowed us to take advantage of it.
Shame on the warmongers who would use it to kill other humans.
The paranoid might say.. (Score:2)
Re:I was watching Voyager the other day (Score:2)
The first one of this [google.com] result is the one you need
Re:I was watching Voyager the other day (Score:2)
Simple.
Military is willing to spend a fortune on speculative R&D where most companies and agencies would not. This means that the military gets the toys sooner than the rest. Military spent a fortune to harness atomic energy and later others found uses fo
Re:I was watching Voyager the other day (Score:5, Interesting)
You aren't really serious, are you?
Come on, guys. Let's progress beyond freshman seminar and start thinking about things, okay?
Those human beings who are presently living are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of culling. Before modern civilization, say 100 years ago or so, life was very hard. It was incredibly easy to fall off of a cliff, or get eaten by a jaguar, or get constipated and die.
The hard facts of life were exacerbated by the presence of other creatures competing for the same resources our ancestors needed to survive: food and water, mostly, but also the gonads of our fellow human beings. If there's a monkey in that tree, he's going to be able to get to the fruit before you can. If there's a jaguar lurking behind that rock, he's going to be able to get to the monkey. And if there's a human being who's better equipped to kill jaguars, he's going to be able to score more chicks. So great-great-etc.-granddad either responded by figuring out how to kill jaguars, or by figuring out how to kill humans who knew how to kill jaguars. Either one worked.
Think about it: you are the product of 15,000 successive generations of winners. Red in tooth and claw.
So, equipped with these facts, you are somehow surprised that people have a natural penchant for creating tools that give them a competitive advantage? Tools like spears and ovens and sunblock and Viagra and wheels and central heating and cruise missiles and the germ theory of medicine and mascara and shoes and the incandescent light bulb and hafnium bombs.
Use those great big brains, people. They're not just decoration for the top of your spinal cord, you know. Think.
Understand that human beings are competitive, and that competition includes devising tools to wipe out as many of your fellow human beings as possible. This is, to coin a phrase, "human nature."
Our astonishingly young civilization (Score:5, Funny)
It's extremely difficult to take seriously someone who believes that "modern civilization" began about 100 years ago. They must have had a lot of trouble arranging the Constitutional Convention or the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, what with all those jaguars wandering in and eating people.
At least in our post-1904 civilization we've solved the crippling "falling off the cliff" problem.
Re:Our astonishingly young civilization (Score:5, Interesting)
Jaguars weren't a problem in the 1780's or the 1530's, but staph was. So were tuberculosis, tularemia, scurvy, plague, scarlet fever, pneumonia, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria.
Hell, we don't even have to go back 100 years. Today, the rate of infant mortality is about 8 per 1,000 live births. In the 1940's, just 60 years ago, it was nearly six times that.
Let's put it this way: throughout human history from about 300,000 years ago to just very recently, the leading causes of death have been trauma and infectious disease.
Only in the past century has the trend shifted. Today, the leading causes of death in the developed world are all chronic diseases: heart disease, diabetes, cancer. (Statistically, you're still quite likely to die from some kind of trauma, but if you look at all trauma, today you're far more likely to survive an injury that would have killed you even just 20 years ago. God bless the emergency room.)
Do you know what would happen to you if you broke your arm in 1900? Which, incidentally, you'd be far more likely to do, because you would have had far less calcium in your diet, and your bones would have been far weaker. If you broke your arm and you were very lucky, you would merely be crippled for life. Your barber--unless you were one of the relatively few people who lived in or very near a big city, your barber would be your sole source of medical assistance--would reduce the fracture badly, and the absence of anything like a cast would guarantee that it would not set properly. The result would be a permanent disability.
If you were slightly less lucky, your fracture would be a compound one. Your wound would get infected. Your barber would tie a piece of not-altogether-clean cloth around your upper arm, then use a short piece of wood to twist the cloth until it constricted your brachial artery. Then he would cut through the muscles, nerves, vessels, and ligaments in your arm until he reached the bone, and then saw through the bone. Meanwhile, you're unable to scream because you've got a piece of rawhide stuck in your mouth, and you're unable to reach out because three strong men are holding you down. The blood that was trapped in your arm spills out onto the sawdust-covered floor; later, that blood-soaked sawdust will be swept up, lofting whatever dire pathogens you might have been host to into the air.
Of course, if you were only slightly less lucky than that, you'd simply lapse into sepsis and die.
Don't be so arrogant. Only about four generations separate us from a standard of living that many of us would find to be just barely above proto-humans scrabbling around in the dust.
Re:Our astonishingly young civilization (Score:4, Interesting)
Barbers did these things whenever doctors (and dentists!) were not available. That goes up to the early part of the 20th century, and even as late as the 19-teens in some rural parts of America and Europe.
World War I was bad in many ways, but it certainly did wonders to advance the state of the art in trauma medicine.
Incidentally, why barbers? Because they had the straight-razors, of course.
Re:Our astonishingly young civilization (Score:3, Informative)
If you lived in Paris, or London, or Berlin, or New York, or San Francisco. But if you lived in a Hannibal or a Midland or a Bozeman, as the vast majority of Americans and Europeans did, you were out luck.
It's kind of difficult to provide proper medical suvervision to childbirth when things are blowing up around you.
No, it had more to do with childhood fevers than with the war. Besides, the infant mortality
Re:Our astonishingly young civilization (Score:3, Funny)
100%
Just give it time.
Re: on competition (Score:3, Funny)
Bigger weapons mean bigger Fireworks!
Fireworks=more chicks.
More Survival!
Seriously, though. The weapon does not always have to be bigger.
Sounds to me like a hafnium bomb might actually be smaller. Study of new technology (hafnium technology?) can result in miniturization of weaponry, or in advances in totally unreleated fields.
What if there is a cure for cancer in hafnium? What if there is a new power source?
(Unlikely)What if it lets us develop antigravity?
There is no such thing as Pandora's b
Re:I was watching Voyager the other day (Score:3, Insightful)
To scare people enough to keep them from wanting to attack you. You're focusing too much on the "weapon" part of "terror weapon" and not enough on the "terror." More than a few people have worked on weapons like this with the intent of making them so frightening to everybody that nobody would want to see them actually "used."
If
Hafnium bullets. (Score:2)
Hurry!! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, damn, we had better get our best minds on that one !!
Re:Hurry!! (Score:4, Funny)
Available in the shops right now .. (Score:3, Funny)
Exploding trick golf balls - just in time for Christmas. Give your boss the blast of his life and get that promotion you've always wanted.
Spellchecking (Score:2, Troll)
How much energy? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.clavius.org/envsun.html [clavius.org]
but it takes the equivalent energy of about 620,000,000,000,000 million electron volts (MeV) per second to light up a 100-watt light bulb
So the question becomes, how much of this stuff (and how big a "battery") would it take to handle all my energy needs, and does the resulting crap that comes out the other end (when it breaks down) pose an unecessary risk to my health or the health of the environment (ie, is there a way to really "seal" the battery)
Re:How much energy? (Score:3, Informative)
Quote, emphasis mine:
Re:How much energy? (Score:4, Informative)
When atomic weapons explode, most of the energy is released in the soft X-ray region. This is simply a consequence of the black body curve and the (extremely high) temperature of a nuke blast.
In the atmosphere (note emphasis) these soft X-rays are quickly absorbed (average free path is something like 9 in. if I remember correctly) and then re-emitted as thermal radiation. That is why there's a "fireball" from a nuclear bomb.
If the bomb were to explode in space, there would be much less thermal effect.
Why do you think nuclear reactors work through heating water instead of X-ray absorption? Hint: It's not just because it's easier.
No, it's because the reactor materials become hot. Note that in a fission reactor the temperature never reaches several million degrees, where the X-rays would be produced, as they are in a nuclear explosion.
I hope this cleared things up for you. If not, read more at TutorGig [tutorgig.com]. Read the part about 2/3 of the way down under "Effects of a Nuclear Explosion".
Our "Dilythium" Star Trek Crystal (Score:2, Informative)
artlu [artlu.net]
Re:You obviously aren't a Trekkie... (Score:2)
When are they going to be marketed? (Score:3, Funny)
Better Hafnium... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Better Hafnium... (Score:3, Funny)
than Nonium at all.
I was thinking the same thing: is hafnium only 50% as effective as fulnium? Where do they get the unobtanium to make this stuff?
for the sake of humanity (Score:2)
The ethical parameters in this issue is clear. The risks are too high, and the destruction devastating.
Re:for the sake of humanity (Score:2, Funny)
All that Star Wars research back in the 80s... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I shudder to think... (Score:5, Funny)
Dimensions (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure I must be wrong
Re:Dimensions (Score:2)
That would be my assumption as well. Remember a volume of 1 million golf balls would be a sphere 100 times larger than a golf ball - which is maybe a factor of 2 to 4 larger than a 10 MT nuke.
Anyway, reason for size
Splitting U-235 releases 207 MeV
Gamma from Hafnium is 2.45 MeV
Red mercury? (Score:4, Interesting)
</tinfoil hat>
Re:Red mercury? (Score:3, Insightful)
The majority of a fission reaction's fireball comes from the Brehmsstrahlung Effect. Uranium fisses into two incredibly ionized fragments each with a +46 charge on average. Those fragments have a huge amount of kinetic energy and, due to their enormous charge, tend to stop within inches of the detonation--meaning all that energy gets liberated as heat inside a sphere about the same size as a beac
isotope vs isomer (Score:5, Informative)
Next question: how the heck do you control the spin of individual baryons in a nucleus?
Re:isotope vs isomer (Score:5, Informative)
You fire something at the nucleus and isolate the ones where one of the outer-shell nucleons was bumped up to the energy state you want.
If you fire X or gamma rays at the nucleus, you should only be able to excite very short-lived isomers (if it is boosted by absorbing a photon, it can decay by emitting a photon). Firing things like electrons or protons at the nucleus can excite states that don't have a single-photon decay path. These can be metastable.
We do the same thing in HeNe lasers. Helium atoms are excited to a metastable state by electric discharge, and after a while interact with neon atoms, putting them in a state suitable for lasing (target state of neon has almost exactly the same energy as the metastable helium state, so the exchange happens easily).
I hope this helps
Re:isotope vs isomer (Score:3, Interesting)
H
Hafnium as airplane nuclear fuel? (Score:2)
Not to be contrarian, but . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Hiroshima had an estimated yied of 12-16kt, something that can be done these days with 24kg of plutonium (if google serves, anyway).
And a golf ball of hafnium can do one ton?
Seems a little less scary, in a nuclear sense.
M
Re:Not to be contrarian, but . . . (Score:2)
read: ten.
Ignore me.
Re:Not to be contrarian, but . . . (Score:3, Funny)
Once the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. Well once again will they tremble, this time at the sound of our driver!
Hefnerium (Score:2, Informative)
hafnium ? poltential for misdirection (Score:2, Funny)
Has anyone considered the money and research hours spent by all those scientists just to check out this expermental breakthrough.
Then think of all the non-American research people that are going to investigate and spend research dollars if what was said is true about the energy potential of this radioactive isotope?
As our german soldier from "LAugh-In" would say
"Veerry Interesting".
The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch (Score:3, Insightful)
Trust me, if a nuclear hand grenade was a) possible and b) practical, it would already exist.
Re:The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember thinking "If you mess this up, it'll be your last mistake"
I'm glad I'm no longer in the army, but it was kind of neat to try, and fireworks will never be the same again.
Re:The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch (Score:3, Funny)
PS. Any psychologists out there care to tell me what it means?
Experiments not reproducible (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Experiments not reproducible (Score:3, Interesting)
Atomic Weight (Score:3, Informative)
Hafnium is like phoshorus. It spontaneously combusts on contact with air. Adding gamma or xrays isn't going to activate the nucleus of the Hafnium atom somehow.
Elements that offer nuclear energy are either at the low end or high end of the periodic table. Low-end atomic weight element hydrogen and helium (1 and 4) can be made to fuse (fusion) to create middlish weight elements and energy (look at the sun). High-end atomic weight elements like uranium and plutonium (235 and 238) can be made ti split (fission) and create middlish weight atoms.
So there is NO WAY you will get a energy-yielding atomic reaction with hafnium and gamma/xrays.
Hafnium is used in many reactor control rods and are constantly exposed to a barrage of neutrons, gamma rays, fission fragment particles, etc. If this reasearch were true, nearly every nuclear reactor on the planet would be blowing up right now.
Hafnium might be used in weapons, but it is no more dangerous than phosphorus.
I live the greatest adventure anyone could want. - Tosk the Hunted
Re:Atomic Weight (Score:2, Insightful)
your argument is flawed (Score:3, Insightful)
While I have no opinion on whether the effect is real or not, your argument against it is bogus. They aren't claiing an "atomic reaction", they are claiming a state change of the nucleus. It's clear that that exists. The only question is whether it can be induced artificially. If it can, you have a great energy source and the potential to make a bomb. If not, you still have energy release, but it's too slo
Re:Atomic Weight (Score:5, Informative)
The process described is neither fission nor fusion. Instead, it's analogous to how a light bulb works.
(What? Yes, a light bulb. Bear with me.)
In a lightbulb, you add energy to a fillament. The electrons (mostly) in the fillament are placed into excited states by the energy, then very quickly release the energy in the form of photons (visible light) and fall from the excited state into a ground state.
A similar thing can be done to particles other than electrons -- such as neutrons. In most cases, the neutrons fall from the excited state very quickly and release photons (gamma rays and the like).
In hafnium, however, the excited state of the neutrons is metastable -- which is just a fancy way of saying they stay excited for a long time between when they're excited and when they release photons.
If a way could be developed to induce the grounding, then hafnium could be used to store large amounts of energy in the metastable state, and then induced to release it all at once, resulting in much larger discharges than ordinary chemical reactions can store/release.
It doesn't yield energy; at best you get from the grounding the energy you put in to get the neutrons excited. It isn't fission, and it isn't fusion; not what we typically call a "nuclear" reaction. However, it is a beyond-chemical-bond-capacity energy release based on the nucleus.
Oh, and by the way, there are middlish-weight elements that are unstable, and thus can provide nuclear energy through ordinary radioactive decay. The classic example is Technetium, number 43 on the Periodic Table, atomic mass 98.
Lysenkoism (Score:5, Interesting)
The government has been disinviting expert nuclear physicists from funding meetings.
It's not healthy when government runs with an unconfirmed result and overrides the give-and-take of experimental science. The old Soviet Union did this when the government endorsed maverick biologist Lysenko because his ideas were compatible with Marxism.
Notice that even if the result can be confirmed it's still many huge jumps from practical application. First you have to mass-produce the excited isomer of hafnium. Then you have to separate it from normal hafnium, a far harder problem than uranium enrichment. Then you need a far higher yield than Collins has claimed, because even at the rate his experiments claim, you'd spend far more energy triggering decays than you'd get back out.
Stranger things have happened, of course, but right now it makes more sense to be intrigued than to be excited.
obStrangelove (Score:4, Funny)
"That's a commie lie, Mr. President, our studies show livable conditions return within 2 to 3 years."
"Obviously you've never heard of Cobalt Thorium G."
If it worked, more like phaser than bomb... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since most of the scientist trying to replicated the results notes that it either can't be replicated like the original experiment or that they are seeing extremely low efficiencies, it probably isn't a problem in terms of increasing world violence/death/etc...
However, assuming that the original research hinted at what that partiular Hafnium isotope/polymer could do, it would be like an energy sponge: soaking up energy so that it could be squeezed out at a later time.
Since the energy released is gamma only, you could potentially arrange a bank of these and stimulate the material in much the same way as a nitrogen laser and get a gamma beam where the energy being outputted by each stage is cascaded into the next stage to create a denser coherent beam.
Would be interesting to see if this Hafnium stuff pans out. If it does, it would make for an interesting beam cannon as opposed to a bomb. You can't be very selective with a bomb, but you can with a beam.
I'm personally thinking it would be cool to have this technology in a microwave oven. :) Food cooked in under a minute every time. >:)
Even if Hafnium emits X-rays, still no Bomb! (Score:4, Informative)
A bomb requires that a chain reaction occur so that the energy released from the initial X-ray emission propogates and hits other Hafnium atoms, making them emit more X-rays. There are two reasons why the bomb will never 'explode':
1) The possibily bogus research report stated that only a 20 KeV (or a 10 KeV, whatever) would trigger Hafnium emissions. So there would be no propogation from one Hafnium emission to the next.
2) The 2.5 MeV photons would interact with other particles (electrons, itself, etc) and sap away that energy before it came into contact with another Hafnium atom.
So, don't worry about a bomb, it's all vaporware.
Re:Even if Hafnium emits X-rays, still no Bomb! (Score:3, Informative)
But, the problem with that is that you need the X-ray machine to make the Hafnium emit X-rays. If your efficiency isn't really, really high, you can easily expend more energy (in making the Hafnium emit X-rays) than you get back from the Hafnium.
Not all of the dental X-rays are able to make Hafnium emit more X-rays. There's a loss of energy there. And not all of the energy fro
That's not a very efficient nuclear weapon (Score:3, Interesting)
Doing a few calculations:
A golf ball [usga.org] must have a diameter of not less than 1.680 inches (42.67mm)
or a volume [csgnetwork.com] of 40.679 cm^3.
Feeding that into Calculation of Density with Halfnium [allmeasures.com], gives a mass of 0.54143749 kg for a golf-ball sized chunk of Halfnium (neglecting the particular isotope in question).
Assuming metric tons for simplicity, a yield of:
10 tons / 0.54143749 kg
Is equivalent to:
18.5 tons / kg
Compare that with existing nuclear weapons. Once you scale the weapon above a certain size, and using optimal designs, you can obtain much higher yield efficiencies, or Yield-to-Weight Ratio's.
"The W-54 Davy Crockett warhead [nuclearweaponarchive.org] ... was the lightest ever deployed by the US, with a minimum mass of about 23 kg (it also came in heavier packages) and had yields ranging from 10 tons up to 1 Kt in various versions."
Yield-to-Weight Ratios of US Mk-53 Nuclear Weapon [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
2.25 kt/kg
Or
2,250,000 tons / kg
Which is a MUCH higher efficiency weapon - at least in the energy sense.
Re:Bah (Score:2)
So while a bomb is the natural first step (or proof of concept if you will), the power plants and other uses will definetly come afterwards.
Re:Bah (Score:5, Funny)
1. can you blow it up?
2. can you have sex with it?
3. can you profit from it?
if atleast one condition is filled, it might be worth researching/funding
Re:Bah (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bah (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact is that even without armies or wars weapons would still be made.
The reason is that a weapon makes a good intermediate scientific goal - deliver and release large amount of energy to a small remote location.
People who experienced the delight of making something go "Boom" (however small) on command will understand what I am talking about. (Explosives not required - compressed air will do just fine..)
Re:Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bah (Score:3, Interesting)
After that, you can easily get the money to liberate the energy in a controlled manner and turn it into a peaceful invention.
Also, at this stage, it maybe much more easier to just focus on the way to liberate the energy without the hassle to figure out how to control it.
But, don't forget, at end, they get married and add many children (no necessarily in that order).
Re:Bah (Score:3, Interesting)
This means that our best hope of
Re:Bah (Score:3, Interesting)
Step One is triggerable release of disordered energy (heat and noise) from a new source by whatever means.
Steps Two through N are learning to control it in various ways: maximizing the yield, tuning the yield, controlling the timing of the effect, using it in cascade with other things. Compare for example the incandescent light bulb, which gives most of its output in infrared, with fluorescent lights, light-emitting diodes. Compa
Re:Plot for next Bond movie (Score:2)
Ten TONS, not ten KILOTONS. (Score:4, Informative)
On a side note, this kind of makes the terrorist thing a moot point. I mean, I have to think it'd be very tricky to make a weapon out of these things, since there is so much debate on whether or not it's even possible to unlock the energy (hence the "Cold Fusion" reference). If it's a more difficult to weaponize this stuff than uranium and plutonium, as well as having less destructive power, I doubt we'll see any terrorists using this kind of thing as a weapon for a long, long time.
I'm not particularly worried. Seems we've already let a much more horrible genie out of the bottle.
Re:Scotty, beam me the hell outta here! (Score:3, Funny)