"Ivan" the Tsar Bomb :O

The sun fuses about 4 million tons of hydrogen a second, each gram of hydrogen fusing is about equivalent to 80 tons of TNT, so yea thats like 320,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT going off per second.... or 320 million megaton bombs..... per second

The power that hits the earths surface each second is about 154,337,280,000,000,000 watts. The most powerful nuclear reactor power plants put out 30 million times less energy than sunlight that reaches the earths surface.

Kind of makes me want to punch people in the face who think it would be impossible to get all our energy needs from solar power.

The size of the bombs we can make is only limited by the amount of fuel we wish to enrich. Weapons grade uranium isn't cheap like gold is. :

rocketparrotlet said:

None of them could go off in the first place, because they are all subcritical mass. Otherwise, they would have gone off immediately. Actually, their ability to start a chain reaction decreases constantly because their radiation is decaying.

-Mark

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at a 4 billion year half-life.

PyroEric said:

Plutonium is not only radioactive, its one of the most powerful neurotoxins in the world.

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The radiation (alpha I believe) isn't harmful unless you're experiencing it from the inside-out. The radiation doesn't even travel more than a few centimeters in air and is stopped by the first few skin cells which are dead anyway.

PyroEric said:

Kind of makes me want to punch people in the face who think it would be impossible to get all our energy needs from solar power.

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possible != practical

at a 4 billion year half-life.

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Oh just think about a glowy keychain on DX like that instead of the 10-12 year tritium ones.

Tsar Bomba was incredibly powerful. But, the amount of power out of the several hundred kg's of fissile material is nothing compared to a matter-anti-matter detonation. Supposedly, anti-matter produces so much energy that only ONE kg of the stuff will produce a 50mt explosion!!!! The only problem is we can only produce anti-matter in the amount of several ATOMS at a time.

And the US thermo-nuclear detonation that blew up a pacific island was Castle Bravo---it was an "accident" though. They used lithium-6 for the first time as fusion fuel, basically it produced much more yield then the projected 4 or so megatons. H bombs are actually fusion-boosted atomic weapons. The majority of the yield comes from the fissile material, but the fusion material boosts the yield.

High yield bombs are cool, but we basically realized that multiple "smaller" warheads are more efficient. ten 250 kt bombs each hitting seperate targets have more then enough power to destroy an entire city. With a single, large warhead your destroying the city....and alot of land with no other possible value except for miniscule amount of resources.

I read up more on the Tsar Bomb. Apparently, it was responsible for 25% (!) of all of the combined radioactive fallout from American and Russian nuclear tests! That is just ridiculous, almost unbelievable.

We could theoretically make bombs in the gigaton range, they would just be extremely massive and impractical. Oh yeah, and they would also produce enough fallout to poison entire continents...

The way this would work is because of explosion "stages". A one-stage bomb is a fission bomb, and I don't think they can even reach a megawatt. Two-stage bombs are the standard thermonuclear weapon. They are capable of reaching up to about 20 megatons, I believe. Two-stage weapons involve a fissile source (such as plutonium or uranium-238) and a fusion source (such as some form of lithium or hydrogen, like deuterium or tritium, leading to the term "hydrogen bomb".) There have only been 2 three-stage bombs ever tested, the 25-megaton B41 (United States), and the Tsar Bomb (Russia). Three-stage weapons are like two-stage weapons, except they have an extra fusion source that amplifies their power even further. It is theoretically possible to produce four-stage or even five-stage weapons in this manner, however, the fallout and weight (as stated above) make this impractical.

-Mark

The largest one we(us) ever had was 25 megatons, but the largest we ever tested was 15(castle bravo) And yes the standard Hydrogen bomb is two stage---called the Tellar-Ullem desgin. I believe we developed the first one(Ivy mike) in 1952. Very impressive stuff. And there is a point where a bomb with enough yield would turn our atmosphere into a large incandescent light bulb. before we tested Trinity they theorized with the amount of heat, it would ignite all of the nitrogen in our atmosphere(about 78%) after the test they realized it wasn't enough, but theorized a large enough bomb would do so---thus ending Earth's ability to house life. Also, with a gigaton bomb, we might have to worry about pushing the Earth out of its orbit---that would be bad.

It's nice to know we can make such powerfull bombs, in case that asteroid comes.At least pure power is gonna be enough to knock it off it's trajectory.

Switch said:

It's nice to know we can make such powerfull bombs, in case that asteroid comes.At least pure power is gonna be enough to completely vaporise it/

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there I fixed it for you

So we can wait 5000 years or so until an asteroid hits us, or we can build insane nuclear bombs that turn the whole earth a radioactive wasteland in about 5 days?

I don't think that the choise is hard

Lighhouse said:

So we can wait 5000 years or so until an asteroid hits us, or we can build insane nuclear bombs that turn the whole earth a radioactive wasteland in about 5 days?

I don't think that the choise is hard

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in 5000 years we wont need nukes, we'll have super lasers

Diachi said:

[quote author=Switch link=1223927853/20#22 date=1226182352]It's nice to know we can make such powerfull bombs, in case that asteroid comes.At least pure power is gonna be enough to completely vaporise it/

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there I fixed it for you  
[/quote]

No, the amount of power you'll need will be MASSIVE compared to simply blasting it off a tiny bit. Or......You could fire your SUPER 0.000000000001
mrad 300 yota watt laser at it and well you know....

--hydro15

I think this may well be the crater left by the Tsar bomb. It is on the east coast of Novaya Zemla and looks about the right size. It seems artificial. Certainly I cannot see any other similar looking features.

If I am right, then I think this may well be the only crater from a nuclear weapon that is visible from space.

Since matter-antimatter reaction is a 100% energy conversion process you could find out what the yield of 1g reaction (.5g of each) would be using Eistein's equation.

E / m = c2 = (299,792,458 m/s)2 = 89,875,517,873,681,764 J/kg ([ch8776]9.0 × 1016 joules per kilogram)

So one gram of mass — approximately the mass of a U.S. dollar bill — is equivalent to the following amounts of energy:

89.9 terajoules
24.9 million kilowatt-hours ([ch8776]25 GW·h)
21.5 billion kilocalories ([ch8776]21 Tcal) [5]
21.5 kilotons of TNT-equivalent energy ([ch8776]21 kt) [5]
85.2 billion BTUs [5]

1kg would be a 21.5 Megaton yield...


Take a look at this page for other stange and scary weapons from our past and future...
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/gallery/2008-05/worlds-spookiest-weapons

hydrogenman15 said:

[quote author=Diachi link=1223927853/20#23 date=1226187910][quote author=Switch link=1223927853/20#22 date=1226182352]It's nice to know we can make such powerfull bombs, in case that asteroid comes.At least pure power is gonna be enough to completely vaporise it/

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there I fixed it for you  
[/quote]

No, the amount of power you'll need will be MASSIVE compared to simply blasting it off a tiny bit.  Or......You could fire your SUPER 0.000000000001
mrad 300 yota watt laser at it and well you know....

--hydro15[/quote]
the current most powerful laser in operation in the world might do it. 1.1 Petawatt in Pulsed operation which is 1,000,000,000,000,000 Watt (1000 Billion or 1 Trillion). run it at 550 Terawatt in CW operation, put it against the world's highest thermal threshold colliminating lens and there you have it.  ;D you can read up on it here and here. the nice part is that it's a Green laser, so you might go blind just by looking at the beam.

Nuclear bombs arent very good for dealing with incoming asteroids. There are numerous problems, including:

- no feasible means to plant them on an asteroid at any distance
- due to the lack of that distance, it will not actually work
- blowing a serveral cubic-kilometre asteroid to pieces isnt the smartest idea in most scenarios, and vaporizing is out of the question when still couting in megatons.

Also, if you did manage to vaporize a large asteroid, you'd still have a very large amount of vapour coming in - also not a pleasant idea.

None of them could go off in the first place, because they are all subcritical mass. Otherwise, they would have gone off immediately.

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Supercritical masses dont 'go off', at least not in any way comparable to the intended effect of a nuclear weapon.

Depending on the material and amount, the effect consists just of a much-faster-than-natural decay, potentially blasting off enough radiation to kill bystanders, but nothing like the typical mushroom cloud people expect. Such accidents have in fact happened, killed a coupe of people that were working on the experiments, but that's it.

If you have a large enough amount of material in one place, the fission reactions will heat that lump of material up to the part it 'blows up', but that blowing up only means will break itself up in pieces small enough to halt the reaction. This would only split a very tiny portion of the material and does not have any weaponry potential... which is probably fortunate since it would make building nuclear weapons very simple if it did.

"The power that hits the earths surface each second is about 154,337,280,000,000,000 watts. The most powerful nuclear reactor power plants put out 30 million times less energy than sunlight that reaches the earths surface.  

Kind of makes me want to punch people in the face who think it would be impossible to get all our energy needs from solar power."

Nobody has ever said it would be impossible. But it would be hugely expensive - far more so than oil, gas, coal or nuclear.  That's why it's not done.