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Jewish World Review How Stuff Works: How nuclear bombs work By Marshall Brain http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT) North Korea is detonating nuclear bombs underground to test them. Iran is processing nuclear material for power plants, and may or may not also be creating the ingredients for a nuclear bomb. India and Pakistan have tested their own nuclear weapons. And the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China and Israel have had their nuclear arsenals for decades. With nuclear bombs getting more and more common and the threat of nuclear terrorism in the back of everyone's mind, it might be helpful to understand how nuclear bombs work and how easy they are to create. The simplest nuclear bomb is made of uranium. It turns out that uranium is a fairly common, all-natural element that is quite common on planet earth. In some places uranium is more concentrated, and that's where you find uranium mines. If you pull uranium out of the ground and examine it with the proper instruments, you find that there are three different types (aka isotopes) of uranium found in nature. The two most common are Uranium-238 and Uranium-235. U-238 is about 100 times more common that than U-235. The 235 and 238 designations have to do with the number of neutrons the uranium atom contains, and it turns out that three neutrons make a big difference. U-235 has a special property that U-238 (and every other naturally occurring element) lacks. The property is this: If a neutron flies by and hits a U-235 atom, the U-235 immediately becomes U-236. U-236 immediately splits into two smaller atoms while releasing two or three new neutrons. If those new neutrons then hit neighboring U-235 atoms, they immediately split and release more neutrons. And so on. You can see that the number of U-235 atoms splitting could double with each round, and since the process happens instantaneously, untold trillions of U-235 atoms can split in a nanosecond. The interesting thing about this splitting process is that each time a U-235 atom captures a neutron and splits, it releases a substantial amount of energy. The two smaller atoms that the U-235 atom splits into want to fly away from each other, and we see this "flying away" as an explosion. If you can get just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of U-235 to completely split, it generates an amount of energy equivalent to that of 20,000 tons of TNT - the equivalent of millions of sticks of TNT all detonating at once. That's about as much energy as was released by the bomb that exploded over Hiroshima. The Hiroshima bomb completely destroyed the city and killed hundreds of thousands of Hiroshima's citizens. In order for this splitting process to work, you have to have a certain amount of U-235. This amount is known as the critical mass. For U-235, the critical mass is about 120 pounds of U-235 shaped approximately into a ball. If you have less than this critical mass (or if it is flat rather than ball-shaped), the neutrons that fly off tend to end up in the air rather than hitting another U-235 atom, and you do not get an explosion. Obviously you cannot have 120-pounds of U-235 in a ball inside the bomb as you are delivering the bomb, or it would detonate. So the simplest nuclear bombs split the U-235 into two parts placed several feet away from each other. Then one of the parts is fired into the other. For example, one part might be shaped like a large bullet and shot from an artillery barrel into the other part. As soon as the two parts meet and make a critical mass, the chain reaction starts. A nanosecond or two later, the bomb explodes. Even though you started with 120 pounds of U-235, only a small fraction of it has a time to split before the explosion occurs. But all you need is 2 percent of the total amount to split in order to get an immense explosion. You can see that anyone who has access to 120 pounds of U-235 can create a nuclear bomb fairly easily. Fortunately it is not that easy to separate U-235 from U-238, But it has gotten easier as technology advances. The common way to do the separation is to purify uranium from a mine and then convert the uranium to a gas. The U-238 atoms in the gas will be slightly heavier than the U-235 atoms. So if you put the gas into a very fast centrifuge, the U-238 atoms will tend to get slung to the outside and the U-235 atoms stay on the inside. The separation is very slight, so you have to do it thousands of times to get a high enough concentration of U-235 to make a bomb. But obviously it's not impossible, because more than a dozen countries (that we know of) have these centrifuges today. ——— Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here. Previously: How the Hubble Space Telescope works How hay fever works How to know when to rent vs. buy How swine flu works How a kidney dialysis machine works How children die in hot cars How a trillion dollars works How electronic cigarettes work How chimpanzees work How in vitro fertilization works How supertankers work How poisons work How corn works How dog ID chips work How President Obama's limousine works How emergency power works How aircraft carriers work How antibiotics and vaccines work How mucus works How iron and steel work How aspirin works How igloos work How the Predator UAV works How retention ponds work How water absorbers work How melamine works How digital music works How coal mining works How an economic depression works How the liver works How 3D movies work How oil pipelines work How jet packs work How seismographs work How Olympic technology works How Personal Rapid Transit works How 3G works How the Global Position System (GPS) works How octane works How cruise missiles work How submarines work How miles work How octane works How food preservation works How beer works How holding your breath works How smoke detectors work How heat pumps work How your night vision works How concentrating solar collectors work How your key fob works How the common cold works How the Large Hadron Collider Works How making a TV show works How dry cleaning works How exoskeletons work How an oil refinery works How landfills work How the Orion spacecraft works The cutting edge in HDTV Redefining the CD How the HDMI cable scam works How glow-in-the-dark toys work How the subprime mortgage crisis works How gift cards work How Tasers work How giant TV screens work How foreclosure works How Air Force One works How wildfire fighting works How vitamins work How ejection seats work How reattaching limbs works How hot air balloons work How paparazzi work How counterfeiting works How CDs work How the Edsel worked How Stinger missiles work How hybrid cars work How sharks work How mosquitoes work How diesel engines work How water towers work How the Dawn mission works How Kassam rockets work How the North American Eagle works Why aren't we flying to work? How tofu and soy milk work How Colony Collapse Disorder works How airbags work How the U.S. income tax works How gum works How caffeine works How Daylight Saving Time works How a cruise missile works How snow making works © 2007, How Stuff Works Inc. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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