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You speak like you could quickly educate me on something that would take me quite a bit of time to learn. Why is it that everyone says the area will be unusabl
by geggam 8y ago
You speak like you could quickly educate me on something that would take me quite a bit of time to learn.
Why is it that everyone says the area will be unusable for such a long time when the Nagasaki and Hiroshima areas are usable.
Is there a different half life for those nukes than the ones we have today ?
- jacobush 8y agoWell, one is from malfunctioning nuclear reactors, the other thing is a nuclear bomb. Quite different things. Air burst bombs don't produce as much dangerous fallout as ground bursting ones. Ground bombs causes debris on the ground to be ground up to dust and mutated into radioactive isotopes. Nuclear power plants acquire over time nasty radioactive products in the spent fuel. What I was alluding to above though, was that in the event of total war, what the enemy (regardless of sides) will target, is large centralized infrastructure. Such as power plants, including nuclear. So if we have to rebuild in the aftermath, the harder it gets, the more we relied beforehand on centralized power plants, like nuclear plants. Since these will have been bombed to craters. In this scenario, I'm not even considering fallout - just how easily we could get any infrastructure up and running again.
- arethuza 8y agoAlso depends on the design of the bomb - more recent designs tend to be fission-fusion-fission with most of the energy coming from the final fission stage driven by the neutrons from the secondary where most of the fusion happens. Some weapons (e.g. the US B53) came in "clean" and "dirty" versions depending on whether the cladding for the secondary was U238 (dirty) or something non-fissile (clean). If you want to be really nasty you can use something like cobalt to blanket your secondary - cobalt having isotopes that are fairly long half lives but still rather potent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb Fortunately, nobody has built weapons like this.
- noir_lord 8y ago> Fortunately, nobody has built weapons like this. The cynic in me says yet.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoRelated, there's a concept of using radioisotopes as area denial weapons. You disperse an element with half-life in, say, weeks, over some area, and the enemy will not be able to move through it until the radiation subsides. Don't know if this was ever tested, I've read of it once as theoretical concept (along with a handy list of radioisotopes with half-life ranging from hours to months).
- noir_lord 8y agoThat sounds like the nuclear cruise missile they worked on that was powered by an unshielded reactor and could fly around for weeks spewing radioactive byproducts across the land. As a species some of us are really fucked up.
- geggam 8y agoNear as much doesn't change the fact the half life is the same. From what I was taught anyway.