When Scott was showing the flowchart for the process for making Plutonium in a reactor, it reminded me of your channel, Cody... and here you are! What a coincidence!
Nah; this is all "open source" stuff at this point. The only limiting factor in making nuclear weapons is not information; it's acquiring or creating the materials. The "information" cat got out of the bag 60-odd years ago, and there's no putting it back. What he's discussing is stuff that kids learn in college these days, at least those who take nuclear physics courses.
Really? I don't understand any of them. And I lived with a scientist who did his doctoral thesis on the third way they make these. They use photon energy; he did his thesis on photons. That's all I know. I couldn't even read the first page of his paper, which was over 200 pages long. I didn't understand the first page. Math & Science were my weakest subjects. Language was supposed to be my strength but you'd never guess it now. I've been trying to learn German for 5 months. Not going well at all.
X-ray photons are used to detonate secondary fusion stage in thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs! Your roommate could have been the hydrogen bomb scientist, really... Of course no lamp can do it, those photons are produced by regular (or boosted) fission nuclear bomb=)
An underappreciated British contribution to the Manhattan Project, quite apart from the Frisch/Peierls Memorandum that kicked the whole thing off. The American experimenters were getting nowhere with implosion until a) Jeff Taylor showed them the way they were going wouldn't work and b) James Tuck told them about his work with shaped charges.
My favourite factoid about the Trinity test is that after the war they released photos of the test...which included a time stamp and distance scale. A physicist named G.I. Taylor (who had worked on the manhatten project) used those images, with a spot of dimensional analysis, and published papers wherein he calculated (to a remarkable degree of accuracy) what the explosive yield of the device was. He got in a little bit of trouble for this, as the number he'd worked out was very classified...but when it was discovered that he was able to work this out from information that was in the public domain, he was let off, and an important lesson was learnt about never underestimating what a clever person will do with information.
A scientist (It may have been Fermi) calculated the Trinity yield by throwing bits off paper into the air, and measuring how far they traveled as the shock wave passed. I think this method predicted a yield of 20 kilotons.
In later years, we used a surprisingly simple method to get a first-order approximation of a weapon's actual yield during a test. Remember those smoke trails you always see next to the mushroom cloud? Those were left by rockets, and were at known points perpendicular to the camera's line of sight. By watching high-speed footage of the test frame-by-frame, the visible disruption of those smoke trails from atmospheric lensing would allow them to track the passage of the shock front... and by calculating the speed at which it was going (from distance between trails and number of frames it took to go that distance), they could get a fairly close estimate of how big a boom they actually got.
This lesson was promptly forgotten by President Trump when he tweeted out classified images of an Iranian launch failure taken by a KH-11 satellite. Scott’s video on the subject uses the publicly known information of the KH-11’s imaging sensor to determine the exact orbit of the spacecraft, allowing the tracking number of that specific satellite to be determined.
Taleric1 "Oh, I'll just hold these two halves of a reflector over a plutonium core juuuuust barely apart with a screwdriver.... *screwdriver slips and both halves cover the core* Oh damn... *radiation intensifies* Hm, well, fuck."
There wasn't a standard operating procedure at the time, but safety was an issue (since there were two instances where people screwing around with the Demon Core lead to fatalities.
I'll fill in what Scott left out after the 8 min mark. Detonation wave profiles take the form of a leading edge pressure spike followed by a region of rarefaction. The shock reflection that would occur at the Al/U interface would produce a higher pressure behind the shock front, minimising the rarefaction that occurred behind the shock front, thus maintaining pressure for a good distance behind it, and thus allowing for the entirety of the core to be compressed to a higher degree, rather than the material that was just behind the shock front at that period of time.
yeah ... think of it what you want but some technology had to be invented from scratch to make the manhattan project a reality and others were advanced by decades.
In the video at the end, you can see a few of these engineers (actually nuclear scientists): Feynman on the left (no shirt, slight belly), Oppenheimer (slim man with the hat) who was the director of the program. The others I didn't recognize. I wonder who the guy with a pen on his ear is.
It´s hard to wait till you get to Castle Bravo and fusion. I love this series. Do you already know where you will stop are do you go up to the point where you´ll talk about Tokamaks Stellators and the National Ignition Facility?
I know that I need at least 3 more parts covering 1) Improving implosion devices (hollow cores, fission boosting, etc) 2) Thermonuclear 3) Enriching Uranium & Manufacturing Plutonium.
Sounds cool. maybe if yoou have time and Ask nice the people at the NIF may give you a tour for the Video. but these three Parts are already a good thing to look foward to. But it´s always a problem of time and Space and all that inside a curvey Spacetime. Sometimes I wish we would have Tardisses or what ever the plural of TARDIS is.
and after that there is gen 4 nuclear weapons too : antimatter initiated fusion weapons; which can theoretically be minimized to a *much* smaller scale .
And while we're at it, you can go off a tangent and use 'Plutonium production' as a subject to cover nuclear power reactors, the various types of that, notable incidents, and planned future nuclear power generation?
The Earth I'm no nuclear physicist, but my understanding is that the heat and pressure created by the fission causes the hydrogen nuclei in the plasma to near the speed of light, allowing colisions that produce fusion and a crap-ton of energy.
it's worth noting 'fusion bombs' (technically thermonuclear bombs) produce so much energy by combining the forces of fusion and fission. A great deal of their energy is still fission based.
Early on in the project, Fermi's joke/slight speculation about the bomb possibly igniting the atmosphere was a serious concern. They did a lot of calculations on that and concluded it was PROBABLY not possible. Nobody was 100% certain going in to the Trinity test, just mostly pretty sure, maybe 99% it wasn't going to be a thing.
The entire 20th century is truly a technological golden age. The rate at which we progressed from crude planes that flew a few hundred yards to ubiquitous home computers and thousands of artificial satellites is staggering. Player pianos to 3D accelerated video games.
The two horrific world wars and the tense stand-off between two nations that could have ended life as we knew it likely helped accelerate that, somewhat.
I worked on submarine nuclear reactors when I was in the US navy and these videos cover most of the material taught pretty well, I’d love to see many more videos like this, I would definitely watch a series about shock dynamics
If I try to estimate the number of spontaneous fissions, I use this logic: - remaining quantity Q(t) = Q(0) exp(kt) where k = ln(0.5)/t_half - decays per second = -Q(0) k exp (kt) = ln(2)Q(t)/t_half - spontaneous fissions per second = Q(t) * P * ln(2)/t_half Using the table at 2:53, converting the half live periods to seconds, and setting Q(t) to Avogadro's number, I get these figures for the *Number of fissions per mole per second* : For Pu-240: 6.0E23 * 5.0E-6 * ln(2)/5.0E18 = 0.42 For Pu-239: 6.0E23 * 4.4E-10 * ln(2)/1.7E23 = 1.1E-9 Even with a pit of 6 kg (25 moles) consisting of 80% Pu239 and 20% Pu-240 I cannot see how more than about 2 spontaneous fission per second would occur, so from this b-o-t-e-calculation I would say that 1 millisecond would be quick enough in 99.8% of the cases, and from these data I don't see how timescales of microseconds are so crucial to prevent predetonation. Anyone?
We as a species didn't know about radioactivity until the late 1800's. not even half a century later we figured all this out. Will always boggle my mind. Smart people? Alien tech? Amazing stuff that 99.9% of the population doesn't think about.. Amazing explanation/simplification Mr. Manely!
if by brute force ,exploding lenses were used to trigger fission, other type of energy could achieve the same thing ? What about gamma ray lenses ? Would that do something ... ?
Yes, except in Australia, New Zealand, most of North America, parts of the British Isles, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the list goes on. If you want to dictate how people use language, you should put a little effort into maintaining your empire.
Thanks, chilling stuff. I grew up in the cold war and we were warned about 6 minutes before explosion. Hope those days are gone forever. Thanks for your very professional presentation.
Yes, and this fact is used as part of the safety systems of modern nuclear weapons. If a nuclear weapon were to have an anti-tamper system on it, that system could be something as simple as only setting off one of the detonators if someone tries to brute-force the authorization code. Big radioactive mess, no nuclear fireball.
This aspect was actually shown in a 1997 movie 'The Peacemaker' with Nicole Kidman and George Clooney. In the final scene she manages to rip off one of those explosive tiles, and the assembly just explodes like a simple grenade.
Great videos. You're doing an impressive job explaining a lot of these complex technical concepts and making them understandable for most folks. Looking forward to the rest of the series. If you're feeling really confident at explaining difficult to comprehend subjects, how about one on how anyone can think MAD is such a great idea, which is inexplicable to me and a lot of others who think it's simply insane.
Well... That may sound crazy, but the nuclear weapon is the thing, that prevent post II World War wars :P It is the fear of retaliation that stopped the war between USA and Russia. So by developing most destructive device so far, the nuclear phisicists brought peace (sort of :P at least there is no new World Wars) to the world ;)
I've watched/read a lot of stuff about the Manhattan project and nuclear bombs/energy, and so far there have been new info for me in each of your videos. I love how you explain the details instead of just glancing over them.
Have you read the Nuclearsecrecy blog, by the creator of Nukemap? That goes into a lot more detail than anything else I have read. Stuff like how a lot of the energy of an H bomb actually comes from fission.
Reactors make plutonium as a by product the a goal for plutonium is more cheaper easier bombs that is the point of of going ror plutonium. Enriched uranium even at low none weapons grade is a problem because with that you can make reactors and the reactors will make your easy bomb material plutonium the ignition timing for the explosives is tricky but only down to nanosecond tolerances easily within the capability of switching diode available for purchase through digikey not that big a deal to set up if you have a 100 mhz scope and can read the graticule.
8:18 Engineering shockwave interference patterns using pencil, paper, and slide-rules (not super-computers or even calculators) deserves it's own video. Damn, those were some geniuses. How did they even measure explosive speeds nearly 5 miles per second to the necessary accuracies needed without computers? As destructive (and controversial) as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, no one can deny the shear brilliance of the human mind.
First time I've seen photo of implosion test result on metal cylinder. Fascinating! After decades of gobbling up data on nuclear weapons, I must say you have demonstrated very fine knowledge of the process in an excellent video. I learned some new things here, like the complexity of the "urchin" neutron initiator. Now, how did they print such a modern looking, stick on label on that first 2.5 micro gram of PU239 sample? Do you have any photos of the inside of the gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, during its operation? I'm always stunned by what that plant accomplished, and how fast it was built. Thank you.
The implosion reminds me of neutron star formation. A huge collapse crushing the center down with huge pressure. Of course, implosion only crushes the pit down to about half it size vs neutron stars whose collapse crushes the stars core down ~idk ...10,000 times as the electron degeneracy pressure is overcome and atoms collapse into just the nucleus ...or neutrons. Love your video's Scott !
The other part of the Manhattan Project, radiation experiments on humans! Yay, heh, heh, heh! I love it when I pee glowing blue stuff! More isotopes, please!
Can you make a video about the viability of thorium reactors? I've heard that thorium is very abundant and produces energy more efficiently and cleanly than uranium, and that the only thing standing in the way of us using it as an energy source is opposition from the oil industry preventing enough funding into development of the technology. Could you elaborate on all of the details of thorium reactors?
OK maybe I'm really stupid, but my commonsensical reasoning says surely when you shoot something along a gun barrel it starts off at maximum speed and gradually slows down... doesn't it? I mean, I know it obviously doesn't because you're the physicist and you've just explained at length how much longer gun barrels are required in order to shoot the plutonium at higher speeds. But why is this???
The bullet keeps accelerating down the barrel because the gases behind it are still expanding; the instant it leaves the barrel, it stops accelerating because there is no longer any force behind the bullets mass. Of course, if the barrel is too long, eventually the gases won't have enough force to continue pushing against the bullet and it will stop accelerating - extreme case would be the bullet stops while still in the barrel, but you wouldn't engineer a barrel length like that. A shorter barrel means the bullet leaves the barrel before the gases behind the bullet can fully accelerate it to a max velocity. So, same phenomenon - as soon as the bullet leaves the shorter barrel, the bullet stops accelerating.
Very interesting. I had already read quite a bit about the Manhattan project and yet I somehow managed to learn new stuff in this video. Could you please list your sources though? Apart from the Critical Assembly Simulator by Alex Wellerstein I've no idea where all the pictures and simuations come from.
Fermi also suspected that the electromagnetic pulse from the Trinity explosion would destroy measuring instruments, so they were shielded. Despite the effort a significant number were destroyed. Someone must have been taking notes because it led to experiments like Starfish Prime, and the Soviet K bomb (EMP) test.
11:55 "Saturdays are for assembling nuclear weapons with the boys" legitimately, though, this looks a lot like me and my friends working in dropping an engine into their Jeep.
The shape charges sound similar to what General Fusion is trying to do, where a bunch of pistons spherically compress a liquid metal tank with plasma in the middle to achieve fusion.. hopefully.
Again, I've read what I thought was a lot of the publicly available literature around these devices, but I'm clearly missing huge chunks, as I'd never even heard of the efforts for Thin Man. What are your major references?
Does Scott even think about the issue? Or maybe the fact that it is all fast shockwaves does something strange, like making the impedance go imaginary?
The interactive simulation he used in the video was actually quite fascinating! Mess around with the settings a bit! blog nuclearsecrecy com/misc/criticality/
12:52 “The yield was actually twice what the scientists expected” hmm, I’m sure lessons were learnt and the US Scientists would never underestimate a bombs yield again…………………………
Garage gadget : episode three CHECK. all I'm missing is the enriched uranium, fissile plutonium ,comp-b, polonium, exotic tampers etc etc etc .... but, I have the aluminum and all the copper wire I could ever need. cant wait for episode 4.... WHEN are we gonna do the Hydrogen bomb...!?!?
Modern nuclear non-proliferation is doing it's job by keeping a few of those ingredients out of your hands. The weapon design itself could be freely distributed for all the difference it would make. Need to build your own reactor if you want the materials for a bomb, and countries that try that have a habit of attracting cruise missiles, drone strikes, and the like to the reactor site. Or some state-sanctioned hacking group will just make your centrifuges self-destruct by over-speeding them.
2-and-a-half TONS of shaped explosives, to compress 6 kg of plutonium down to 1/2 its normal size (or is it cube-root-of(1/2) ?) for a couple microseconds... definitely music to my rocket scientist ears 🙂 !!! what's still puzzling to me though, why go to the trouble of physically compressing the plutonium (requiring TONS of explosives) compared to starting with a hollow sphere of plutonium and simply collapsing it into a non-hollow sphere (which I'm assuming would take a fraction of the explosives) ? I'm guessing that turning a given mass of plutonium into a hollow sphere doesn't actually turn it into a sub-critical mass, the fissile neutrons will still fiss even if they have to cross the hollow ? I'm guessing what's really going on with compression is you're increasing the cross section, the probability of neutron capture, of the plutonium, which lowers its critical mass to be below what you started with. But even if the cross section is increased, the path length the neutrons have to go to escape is shortened, so its not obvious how these balance in favor of chain reaction.
Excellent Video! I appreciate you taking the time to educate us on this matter. This also puts into perspective how intelligent the people involved in the Manhattan project were.
SIR i must point out a error on your part describing the explosive sphere that i must correct... your may regonise is as a FOOTBALL not a soccer ball kind regards 🇪🇺😂👍just because america cant understand it lol otherwise im enjoying the video very much lol
Designing and building a useful (not necessarily efficient or high-yield) fission device is not that difficult and any video such as this will make absolutely no difference. The hard part is getting the materials needed. It's so hard that really only state-run manufacturing programs will be successful. NK has already mastered both aspects of nuclear weapon production.
By their 120 kiloton test I'm sure that they have the implosion and explosive lens concept down already. If the images they show of their "fusion bombs" are accurate, they're significantly better designed than 1940s era weapons. It does make me wonder who is providing North Korea with research. I'm guessing the Chinese, but it could be the Russians, or the Illuminati, who can tell.
Story about one of my old climbing partners When [my partner] arrived at Los Alamos, his supervisor handed him a pea-size chunk of dull grayish metal and said, This is the world's supply of plutonium. I m going to lunch; please brief me on its metallurgical properties when I get back. [He] pondered his task, then put the pellet on an anvil and smacked it with a hammer, and later reported to his supervisor that it was malleable. As he recounted later, fortunately it was very impure plutonium; otherwise it would have pulverized and contaminated the entire building. That's just one of his after dinner tales about being on the cutting edge.
How do modern weapons overcome the 6 months lifespan of the neutron initiator? More generally, I'd like a detailed explanation of the "huge energy is released" part which is often glossed over in such videos. I.e. how does fission physically result in fire, shockwaves, radiation, etc covering many kilometres? 👌👍
Did any other nation test a U235 bomb like the Hiroshima device? Plutonium seems to have an advantage in terms of yield efficiency and ease of fuel production, but a disadvantage in terms of firing complexity. It seems like all the later nuclear programs went the plutonium route, but I don’t know that for sure.
Is that humming sound radiation? Lol spooky pretty good stuff Scott Manley you very smart always wondered how these worked I was born in 1980 here in Texas remember the cold war well had too drill for it in school. You from Scotland? My ancestors came over from there 200 years ago my name is Jeff Scott Johnston. Now it sounds like Putin is deep in new nuclear technologies we dont even have pretty scary
My dad turned 19 on his way across the Pacific on 7/16/45, the day the gadget was tested. On 8/9/45, a destroyer sailing next to his was hit by a kamikaze, the day the real thing exploded over Nagasaki.
Just after you edited over the mistake of saying plutonium 210 at 11:32 you said polonium 240 has a half life of about 6 months. You mean polonium 210.. By the way I love this video crammed with information, so it's understandable that you might mix up a little piece of info like that !
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Scott if you're so smart why you need a script??? Thanks but no thanks, i came to learn about implosion technology.. Not wank my little boy willy at the big boys toys.. Explosion based technology is killing our planet. But sure.. Why don't we praise it because it killed hitler? :)
Could you do a video on the detonation synchronization circuit. It must have been such a challenge to get all of those explosives to sync up at the same time with the technology available at that time.
Hedging their bets B.S. if they couldn't separate the u235 then the couldn't make reactors to make plutonium the plutonium drive is quantity driven not very much plutonium was needed and it is easy to aquire from the reactors more bombs was the object
Yes, it's 2020 and I'm watching this again. Sue me. Anyway, I was wondering - does anyone know if there were any _failed_ test attempts before Trinity?
I think they accent he has may have been the predominate one in early Canada. I'm thinking out loud here, I could be completely wrong, the way he says -out is very Canadian. It could also very well be the admixture of French instead or a combination of both.
Around 4:00 you explain that the shorter distances in an implosion device mean that the time between onset and maximum criticality is very short. But how is this achieved? With a shorter 'barrel' I expect lower implosion speed of the pit when being compressed. The compression phase lasts about 5μs?
If my math teacher had told me calculus could be used to calculate the curve of explosives to produce fission I'd have learned it. Instead I did worksheets about nothing and learned nothing. 'Murica
yessssss!! really enjoy thees videos!
Cody'sLab No, just no! Don't built atom bombs on your background please 😂
Hi I'm Cody and welcome to my Manhattan project!
Do you have some plutonium on your collection?
When Scott was showing the flowchart for the process for making Plutonium in a reactor, it reminded me of your channel, Cody... and here you are! What a coincidence!
cue articles about the "Nuclear Boyscout"
Is part 5 going to be about how to remove yourself from government-watchlists ?
you mean Google's 'analytic' system :-)
Nah; this is all "open source" stuff at this point. The only limiting factor in making nuclear weapons is not information; it's acquiring or creating the materials. The "information" cat got out of the bag 60-odd years ago, and there's no putting it back. What he's discussing is stuff that kids learn in college these days, at least those who take nuclear physics courses.
Nah, it's stuff kids learn in middle school during GCSE's between 14 and 16 years old, and it's mandatory. Really simple stuff :P
proof of open-source-ness: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
@jesper O lmao
When you do nuclear science CHECK YO STAGIN!
Ave Vovus! You’re lucky that joke didn’t bomb...
And make sure you buy the t-shirt!
A missile with a nuclear warhead doesn't need any parachutes, so there's no problem xD
Yes, I know that this wasn't your point.
@togamid if you stage the detonation, before the launch ... BIG PROBLEM XD
togamid Some air drop bombs have chutes.
Premature detonation while the core is not even fully inserted. I hate when that happens...
I see what you did there...
@@dzejrid oh man... you win the internet
That’s why you need a fast insertion time
Just think about boron on a cold day.
Shorter gun barrels increases chances of premature detonation? damn...
Scott, I'm really enjoying these Going Nuclear videos so far but could you please skip ahead to the DIY episodes?
Sincerely,
Kim
kek
also, 42nd like.
101010
I'm on to you Kim Possible
@@noahhastings6145 No secrets here.
Explosive lenses are such a cool idea! Great video :)
thedreadnote
Next they are going to come up with the explosive telescope.
Really? I don't understand any of them. And I lived with a scientist who did his doctoral thesis on the third way they make these. They use photon energy; he did his thesis on photons. That's all I know. I couldn't even read the first page of his paper, which was over 200 pages long. I didn't understand the first page. Math & Science were my weakest subjects. Language was supposed to be my strength but you'd never guess it now. I've been trying to learn German for 5 months. Not going well at all.
X-ray photons are used to detonate secondary fusion stage in thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs! Your roommate could have been the hydrogen bomb scientist, really... Of course no lamp can do it, those photons are produced by regular (or boosted) fission nuclear bomb=)
An underappreciated British contribution to the Manhattan Project, quite apart from the Frisch/Peierls Memorandum that kicked the whole thing off. The American experimenters were getting nowhere with implosion until a) Jeff Taylor showed them the way they were going wouldn't work and b) James Tuck told them about his work with shaped charges.
That part totally blew my mind, such a simple yet smart solution.
My favourite factoid about the Trinity test is that after the war they released photos of the test...which included a time stamp and distance scale. A physicist named G.I. Taylor (who had worked on the manhatten project) used those images, with a spot of dimensional analysis, and published papers wherein he calculated (to a remarkable degree of accuracy) what the explosive yield of the device was.
He got in a little bit of trouble for this, as the number he'd worked out was very classified...but when it was discovered that he was able to work this out from information that was in the public domain, he was let off, and an important lesson was learnt about never underestimating what a clever person will do with information.
A scientist (It may have been Fermi) calculated the Trinity yield by throwing bits off paper into the air, and measuring how far they traveled as the shock wave passed. I think this method predicted a yield of 20 kilotons.
And said G.I., Ted Taylor, went on to be one of our preeminent nuclear weapons designers postwar.
In later years, we used a surprisingly simple method to get a first-order approximation of a weapon's actual yield during a test. Remember those smoke trails you always see next to the mushroom cloud? Those were left by rockets, and were at known points perpendicular to the camera's line of sight. By watching high-speed footage of the test frame-by-frame, the visible disruption of those smoke trails from atmospheric lensing would allow them to track the passage of the shock front... and by calculating the speed at which it was going (from distance between trails and number of frames it took to go that distance), they could get a fairly close estimate of how big a boom they actually got.
@@rdfox76 at last... I always wonder whats that trail surrounding during early parts of explosion mushroom... Thanks for the info!
This lesson was promptly forgotten by President Trump when he tweeted out classified images of an Iranian launch failure taken by a KH-11 satellite. Scott’s video on the subject uses the publicly known information of the KH-11’s imaging sensor to determine the exact orbit of the spacecraft, allowing the tracking number of that specific satellite to be determined.
You have to cover the accidents that occurred with the demon core.
Taleric1 "Oh, I'll just hold these two halves of a reflector over a plutonium core juuuuust barely apart with a screwdriver.... *screwdriver slips and both halves cover the core* Oh damn... *radiation intensifies* Hm, well, fuck."
"Everyone mark where you are standing, so we can calibrate your radiation dose vs. how much of your DNA falls apart."
Long Dong Silver I wonder about the safety of standard operational procedure at that time 😓
There wasn't a standard operating procedure at the time, but safety was an issue (since there were two instances where people screwing around with the Demon Core lead to fatalities.
Penningtontj It was definitely a new field of study without a doubt. What a shitty way to go...
“Shock dynamics are incredibly complex and worth videos of their own.”
Please?
That's his way of saying "Sorry, but need-to-know basis."
The information is available online. Ask any questions you have.
@@Evan_Bell Can u provide me the links. Tnks Evan
@@fightingforcatalonia To what? Just Google it.
I still say Scott can be a bond villian
Fly safe Mr bond.... hahahaha
pyro lopez Ahahahahahaaa hahaha!
I could easily see Scott as Ernst Blofeld
I'll fill in what Scott left out after the 8 min mark.
Detonation wave profiles take the form of a leading edge pressure spike followed by a region of rarefaction. The shock reflection that would occur at the Al/U interface would produce a higher pressure behind the shock front, minimising the rarefaction that occurred behind the shock front, thus maintaining pressure for a good distance behind it, and thus allowing for the entirety of the core to be compressed to a higher degree, rather than the material that was just behind the shock front at that period of time.
The engineers involved absolutely earned their slide-rules.
yeah ... think of it what you want but some technology had to be invented from scratch to make the manhattan project a reality and others were advanced by decades.
In the video at the end, you can see a few of these engineers (actually nuclear scientists): Feynman on the left (no shirt, slight belly), Oppenheimer (slim man with the hat) who was the director of the program. The others I didn't recognize. I wonder who the guy with a pen on his ear is.
@@InXLsisDeo Looks like that might be Louis Slotin on the left, leaning into the bomb. Maybe Harry Daghlian Jr on the right?
You should rename this video "The gadget or the soccer ball of DOOM!"
It´s hard to wait till you get to Castle Bravo and fusion. I love this series.
Do you already know where you will stop are do you go up to the point where you´ll talk about Tokamaks Stellators and the National Ignition Facility?
I know that I need at least 3 more parts covering
1) Improving implosion devices (hollow cores, fission boosting, etc)
2) Thermonuclear
3) Enriching Uranium & Manufacturing Plutonium.
Sounds cool. maybe if yoou have time and Ask nice the people at the NIF may give you a tour for the Video. but these three Parts are already a good thing to look foward to. But it´s always a problem of time and Space and all that inside a curvey Spacetime. Sometimes I wish we would have Tardisses or what ever the plural of TARDIS is.
Yesss, enrichment and production. Looking forward to that. The scale of those operations is absolutely mind boggling.
and after that there is gen 4 nuclear weapons too : antimatter initiated fusion weapons; which can theoretically be minimized to a *much* smaller scale .
And while we're at it, you can go off a tangent and use 'Plutonium production' as a subject to cover nuclear power reactors, the various types of that, notable incidents, and planned future nuclear power generation?
Is it Scott's head on the preview?
of course it is
KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
^v^
Yes, just a few videos more and i can finally begin my world domin.. i mean world science... fair... project thing!
Sitting at the fireplace, having a coffee, feeding my brain watching your video, a saturday morning can't start better.
☕️
The gadget is compressing plutonium with the power of tnt
So is fusion bombs using the power of fission to compress hydrogen isotopes?
The Earth I'm no nuclear physicist, but my understanding is that the heat and pressure created by the fission causes the hydrogen nuclei in the plasma to near the speed of light, allowing colisions that produce fusion and a crap-ton of energy.
The pressure of radiation do the most of the job.
Also.. dont discount which lithium isotopes are in your bomb or youll end up with something a WHOLE lot larger than you anticipated ;)
Did someone tell the Americans about Lithium 7 >_
it's worth noting 'fusion bombs' (technically thermonuclear bombs) produce so much energy by combining the forces of fusion and fission. A great deal of their energy is still fission based.
Demonetized for information on the construction of weapons
Colton Turner good luck building a nuke with this knowledge lol
Turns out it's not exactly a cakewalk
is joke
Early on in the project, Fermi's joke/slight speculation about the bomb possibly igniting the atmosphere was a serious concern. They did a lot of calculations on that and concluded it was PROBABLY not possible. Nobody was 100% certain going in to the Trinity test, just mostly pretty sure, maybe 99% it wasn't going to be a thing.
One day in the future we will be able to mine plutonium directly from pluto so we don't have to make it in a lab.
part 5:DIY
Great video. *REMEMBER KIDS, IF YOU DESIGN SOMETHING TO MOVE YOU CAN ALSO DESIGN IT TO CARRY NUCLEAR WEAPONS*
METAL GEAR?!?
moosemaimer actually i never playd metal gear i invented this sentence.
The entire 20th century is truly a technological golden age. The rate at which we progressed from crude planes that flew a few hundred yards to ubiquitous home computers and thousands of artificial satellites is staggering. Player pianos to 3D accelerated video games.
+Sam Harkins but let’s be clear, Player Pianos are amazing, and in fact better than many video games.
and yet the amount of people the think Earth is flat grows...
The two horrific world wars and the tense stand-off between two nations that could have ended life as we knew it likely helped accelerate that, somewhat.
I worked on submarine nuclear reactors when I was in the US navy and these videos cover most of the material taught pretty well, I’d love to see many more videos like this, I would definitely watch a series about shock dynamics
That's not a glowing recommendation 😁🤣
If I try to estimate the number of spontaneous fissions, I use this logic:
- remaining quantity Q(t) = Q(0) exp(kt) where k = ln(0.5)/t_half
- decays per second = -Q(0) k exp (kt) = ln(2)Q(t)/t_half
- spontaneous fissions per second = Q(t) * P * ln(2)/t_half
Using the table at 2:53, converting the half live periods to seconds, and setting Q(t) to Avogadro's number, I get these figures for the *Number of fissions per mole per second* :
For Pu-240: 6.0E23 * 5.0E-6 * ln(2)/5.0E18 = 0.42
For Pu-239: 6.0E23 * 4.4E-10 * ln(2)/1.7E23 = 1.1E-9
Even with a pit of 6 kg (25 moles) consisting of 80% Pu239 and 20% Pu-240 I cannot see how more than about 2 spontaneous fission per second would occur, so from this b-o-t-e-calculation I would say that 1 millisecond would be quick enough in 99.8% of the cases, and from these data I don't see how timescales of microseconds are so crucial to prevent predetonation.
Anyone?
6:19 Where did you get that picture from? I've always been curious as to how they were able to test the explosive lenses.
We as a species didn't know about radioactivity until the late 1800's. not even half a century later we figured all this out. Will always boggle my mind. Smart people? Alien tech? Amazing stuff that 99.9% of the population doesn't think about..
Amazing explanation/simplification Mr. Manely!
This series is great!
Yay for nuclear sciences!
if by brute force ,exploding lenses were used to trigger fission, other type of energy could achieve the same thing ?
What about gamma ray lenses ? Would that do something ... ?
Scientists: Wait! There is a possibility to ignite the whole Earth atmosphere!
Same Scientists: COOL! Let’s place bets!
Football. The name is football.
XxDeathSquadxX well it does have a much higher foot to ball ratio than the American game... so yeah I'll agree to that.
Yes, except in Australia, New Zealand, most of North America, parts of the British Isles, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the list goes on. If you want to dictate how people use language, you should put a little effort into maintaining your empire.
I have to admit american hand egg actually seems like a reasonably sound method of playing football
There is football and American football, they are not the same thing :P.
You should put a little effort into maintaining your knowledge.
Imo the best name for American football would be "American Rugby" :D
Thanks, chilling stuff. I grew up in the cold war and we were warned about 6 minutes before explosion. Hope those days are gone forever.
Thanks for your very professional presentation.
Didnt the need for exact detonation timing help spur the advent of the first germanium transistors?
Hey Mr. Manley Man,
If one of the 32 blocks of explosive material did not ignite, would that keep the weapon from going super critical?
+Mike Stiber yes
Yes, and this fact is used as part of the safety systems of modern nuclear weapons. If a nuclear weapon were to have an anti-tamper system on it, that system could be something as simple as only setting off one of the detonators if someone tries to brute-force the authorization code. Big radioactive mess, no nuclear fireball.
This aspect was actually shown in a 1997 movie 'The Peacemaker' with Nicole Kidman and George Clooney. In the final scene she manages to rip off one of those explosive tiles, and the assembly just explodes like a simple grenade.
This series is mandatory in NK high schools
Plutonium - not only highly radioactive but phenomenally toxic as well. Lovely stuff.
Try Polonium. Just 1 gram would kill 10 million people.
Great videos. You're doing an impressive job explaining a lot of these complex technical concepts and making them understandable for most folks. Looking forward to the rest of the series. If you're feeling really confident at explaining difficult to comprehend subjects, how about one on how anyone can think MAD is such a great idea, which is inexplicable to me and a lot of others who think it's simply insane.
I have become death, the destroyer of worlds...
Well... That may sound crazy, but the nuclear weapon is the thing, that prevent post II World War wars :P It is the fear of retaliation that stopped the war between USA and Russia. So by developing most destructive device so far, the nuclear phisicists brought peace (sort of :P at least there is no new World Wars) to the world ;)
Yea, MAD (mutually assured destruction) is an insane, but effective concept that kept the cold war from escalating.
So, you’ve seen Red October...
ironically MAD requires that only sane people, with a degree of self-preservation, have access to nuclear weapons
Literally
I've watched/read a lot of stuff about the Manhattan project and nuclear bombs/energy, and so far there have been new info for me in each of your videos. I love how you explain the details instead of just glancing over them.
Have you read the Nuclearsecrecy blog, by the creator of Nukemap? That goes into a lot more detail than anything else I have read. Stuff like how a lot of the energy of an H bomb actually comes from fission.
@@charleslambert3368 That's very basic information available on wikipedia..
Reactors make plutonium as a by product the a goal for plutonium is more cheaper easier bombs that is the point of of going ror plutonium. Enriched uranium even at low none weapons grade is a problem because with that you can make reactors and the reactors will make your easy bomb material plutonium the ignition timing for the explosives is tricky but only down to nanosecond tolerances easily within the capability of switching diode available for purchase through digikey not that big a deal to set up if you have a 100 mhz scope and can read the graticule.
The smart guys were the ones that made the kriton ignitors
What have you read or watched? We're you sober? We're there a lot of plush ponies? You won't find physics in a happy meal 🤣
The cast of Galaxy Quest is coming to retrieve the Beryllium Sphere!
Link to the Criticality Simulator blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/misc/criticality/
Trinity and Beyond the Atomic bomb movie, is one of my favorite documentaries.
More and faster! Please and thank you.
8:18 Engineering shockwave interference patterns using pencil, paper, and slide-rules (not super-computers or even calculators) deserves it's own video. Damn, those were some geniuses. How did they even measure explosive speeds nearly 5 miles per second to the necessary accuracies needed without computers?
As destructive (and controversial) as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, no one can deny the shear brilliance of the human mind.
First time I've seen photo of implosion test result on metal cylinder. Fascinating! After decades of gobbling up data on nuclear weapons, I must say you have demonstrated very fine knowledge of the process in an excellent video. I learned some new things here, like the complexity of the "urchin" neutron initiator. Now, how did they print such a modern looking, stick on label on that first 2.5 micro gram of PU239 sample?
Do you have any photos of the inside of the gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, during its operation? I'm always stunned by what that plant accomplished, and how fast it was built. Thank you.
The implosion reminds me of neutron star formation. A huge collapse crushing the center down with huge pressure. Of course, implosion only crushes the pit down to about half it size vs neutron stars whose collapse crushes the stars core down ~idk ...10,000 times as the electron degeneracy pressure
is overcome and atoms collapse into just the nucleus ...or neutrons. Love your video's Scott !
Thanks Scott! You're a great lecturer!
The other part of the Manhattan Project, radiation experiments on humans! Yay, heh, heh, heh! I love it when I pee glowing blue stuff! More isotopes, please!
Can you make a video about the viability of thorium reactors? I've heard that thorium is very abundant and produces energy more efficiently and cleanly than uranium, and that the only thing standing in the way of us using it as an energy source is opposition from the oil industry preventing enough funding into development of the technology.
Could you elaborate on all of the details of thorium reactors?
OK maybe I'm really stupid, but my commonsensical reasoning says surely when you shoot something along a gun barrel it starts off at maximum speed and gradually slows down... doesn't it?
I mean, I know it obviously doesn't because you're the physicist and you've just explained at length how much longer gun barrels are required in order to shoot the plutonium at higher speeds.
But why is this???
Propellant keeps burning creating more pressure. There are fast or slow burn gun powders for hand guns vs rifles.
The bullet keeps accelerating down the barrel because the gases behind it are still expanding; the instant it leaves the barrel, it stops accelerating because there is no longer any force behind the bullets mass. Of course, if the barrel is too long, eventually the gases won't have enough force to continue pushing against the bullet and it will stop accelerating - extreme case would be the bullet stops while still in the barrel, but you wouldn't engineer a barrel length like that. A shorter barrel means the bullet leaves the barrel before the gases behind the bullet can fully accelerate it to a max velocity. So, same phenomenon - as soon as the bullet leaves the shorter barrel, the bullet stops accelerating.
Scott, have you toured the “B” reactor?
Very interesting. I had already read quite a bit about the Manhattan project and yet I somehow managed to learn new stuff in this video.
Could you please list your sources though? Apart from the Critical Assembly Simulator by Alex Wellerstein I've no idea where all the pictures and simuations come from.
Fermi also suspected that the electromagnetic pulse from the Trinity explosion would destroy measuring instruments, so they were shielded. Despite the effort a significant number were destroyed. Someone must have been taking notes because it led to experiments like Starfish Prime, and the Soviet K bomb (EMP) test.
11:55 "Saturdays are for assembling nuclear weapons with the boys"
legitimately, though, this looks a lot like me and my friends working in dropping an engine into their Jeep.
The shape charges sound similar to what General Fusion is trying to do, where a bunch of pistons spherically compress a liquid metal tank with plasma in the middle to achieve fusion.. hopefully.
Again, I've read what I thought was a lot of the publicly available literature around these devices, but I'm clearly missing huge chunks, as I'd never even heard of the efforts for Thin Man. What are your major references?
Did they need to match the impedances of the 2 explosives? Thus preventing reflections at the interface?
Does Scott even think about the issue? Or maybe the fact that it is all fast shockwaves does something strange, like making the impedance go imaginary?
I suddenly realized why you have no hair. There's not enough room in that head for all that knowledge AND hair follicles. Excellent videos!
If Scott waited one more day to publish it would have been on the 75th anniversary of the first sustained fission reaction, the Chicago Pile 1.
The interactive simulation he used in the video was actually quite fascinating! Mess around with the settings a bit!
blog nuclearsecrecy com/misc/criticality/
Any chance we could get a follow up video/series on the use of nuclear in Space (past, present and future)?
12:52 “The yield was actually twice what the scientists expected” hmm, I’m sure lessons were learnt and the US Scientists would never underestimate a bombs yield again…………………………
11:32 Polonium 210, not 240. Tough keeping plutonium and polonium apart :-)
Garage gadget : episode three CHECK. all I'm missing is the enriched uranium, fissile plutonium ,comp-b, polonium, exotic tampers etc etc etc .... but, I have the aluminum and all the copper wire I could ever need. cant wait for episode 4.... WHEN are we gonna do the Hydrogen bomb...!?!?
Modern nuclear non-proliferation is doing it's job by keeping a few of those ingredients out of your hands. The weapon design itself could be freely distributed for all the difference it would make. Need to build your own reactor if you want the materials for a bomb, and countries that try that have a habit of attracting cruise missiles, drone strikes, and the like to the reactor site.
Or some state-sanctioned hacking group will just make your centrifuges self-destruct by over-speeding them.
I thought atmosphere incineration was a real consideration that was then calculated to be implausible.
2-and-a-half TONS of shaped explosives, to compress 6 kg of plutonium down to 1/2 its normal size (or is it cube-root-of(1/2) ?) for a couple microseconds... definitely music to my rocket scientist ears 🙂 !!!
what's still puzzling to me though, why go to the trouble of physically compressing the plutonium (requiring TONS of explosives) compared to starting with a hollow sphere of plutonium and simply collapsing it into a non-hollow sphere (which I'm assuming would take a fraction of the explosives) ? I'm guessing that turning a given mass of plutonium into a hollow sphere doesn't actually turn it into a sub-critical mass, the fissile neutrons will still fiss even if they have to cross the hollow ? I'm guessing what's really going on with compression is you're increasing the cross section, the probability of neutron capture, of the plutonium, which lowers its critical mass to be below what you started with. But even if the cross section is increased, the path length the neutrons have to go to escape is shortened, so its not obvious how these balance in favor of chain reaction.
Excellent Video! I appreciate you taking the time to educate us on this matter. This also puts into perspective how intelligent the people involved in the Manhattan project were.
I'm sad to admit... But I too have suffered from premature detonation
The more details I learn about nuclear weapons development, the more impressed I am about the speed at which they were able to create them.
I’ve been in the reactor build at Oak Ridge. The reactor and all the equipment needed to operate are still there.
Do you plan to continue this with nuclear propulsion?
It would be downright weird if Scott didn't cover nuclear propulsion.
Again, you're talking about nuclear weapons, and yet close with "Fly safe".. it's kinda ironic, don't you think?
SIR i must point out a error on your part describing the explosive sphere that i must correct... your may regonise is as a FOOTBALL not a soccer ball kind regards 🇪🇺😂👍just because america cant understand it lol otherwise im enjoying the video very much lol
I wonder if North Korea are watching your vids? :P
Designing and building a useful (not necessarily efficient or high-yield) fission device is not that difficult and any video such as this will make absolutely no difference. The hard part is getting the materials needed. It's so hard that really only state-run manufacturing programs will be successful.
NK has already mastered both aspects of nuclear weapon production.
By their 120 kiloton test I'm sure that they have the implosion and explosive lens concept down already. If the images they show of their "fusion bombs" are accurate, they're significantly better designed than 1940s era weapons. It does make me wonder who is providing North Korea with research. I'm guessing the Chinese, but it could be the Russians, or the Illuminati, who can tell.
Was just a joke
Their 120 kt test (It is speculated to be 200 kt) was a *fusion* explosion, and goes far beyond basic atomic fission bombs.
North Korea and Iran have been collaborating on weapons research for decades, check out Arms Control Wonk podcast.
Story about one of my old climbing partners
When [my partner] arrived at Los Alamos, his supervisor handed him a pea-size chunk of dull grayish metal and said, This is the world's supply of plutonium. I m going to lunch; please brief me on its metallurgical properties when I get back. [He] pondered his task, then put the pellet on an anvil and smacked it with a hammer, and later reported to his supervisor that it was malleable. As he recounted later, fortunately it was very impure plutonium; otherwise it would have pulverized and contaminated the entire building.
That's just one of his after dinner tales about being on the cutting edge.
Very disappointed they didn't call the timing unit an Xbox.
How do modern weapons overcome the 6 months lifespan of the neutron initiator?
More generally, I'd like a detailed explanation of the "huge energy is released" part which is often glossed over in such videos. I.e. how does fission physically result in fire, shockwaves, radiation, etc covering many kilometres? 👌👍
Did any other nation test a U235 bomb like the Hiroshima device? Plutonium seems to have an advantage in terms of yield efficiency and ease of fuel production, but a disadvantage in terms of firing complexity. It seems like all the later nuclear programs went the plutonium route, but I don’t know that for sure.
Is that humming sound radiation? Lol spooky pretty good stuff Scott Manley you very smart always wondered how these worked I was born in 1980 here in Texas remember the cold war well had too drill for it in school. You from Scotland? My ancestors came over from there 200 years ago my name is Jeff Scott Johnston. Now it sounds like Putin is deep in new nuclear technologies we dont even have pretty scary
When you look from December 2023 perspective, for the who knows which time watching this content again... Scotty looks almost hairy 😁😁
Manhattan Project film 1986 - teenager builds are nuclear go boom boom with no google or internet or even BBSes.
My dad turned 19 on his way across the Pacific on 7/16/45, the day the gadget was tested. On 8/9/45, a destroyer sailing next to his was hit by a kamikaze, the day the real thing exploded over Nagasaki.
Just after you edited over the mistake of saying plutonium 210 at 11:32 you said polonium 240 has a half life of about 6 months. You mean polonium 210.. By the way I love this video crammed with information, so it's understandable that you might mix up a little piece of info like that !
Scott if you're so smart why you need a script???
Thanks but no thanks, i came to learn about implosion technology..
Not wank my little boy willy at the big boys toys..
Explosion based technology is killing our planet. But sure.. Why don't we praise it because it killed hitler? :)
900 ms, that's 2013 mph, as against 470ms= 1051 mph. I'm glad they did away with the polonium/ Beryllium neutron initiator
Could you do a video on the detonation synchronization circuit. It must have been such a challenge to get all of those explosives to sync up at the same time with the technology available at that time.
8:46 Tungsten carbide tamper?! What the bloody hell is tungsten carbide tamper?! You're all bloody fancy talk since you left London.
Hedging their bets B.S. if they couldn't separate the u235 then the couldn't make reactors to make plutonium the plutonium drive is quantity driven not very much plutonium was needed and it is easy to aquire from the reactors more bombs was the object
Learning lots of details General Groves would spin about. Really helping my hobby project. Thanks!
Yes, it's 2020 and I'm watching this again. Sue me. Anyway, I was wondering - does anyone know if there were any _failed_ test attempts before Trinity?
I think they accent he has may have been the predominate one in early Canada. I'm thinking out loud here, I could be completely wrong, the way he says -out is very Canadian. It could also very well be the admixture of French instead or a combination of both.
Shaped nuclear explosives and casaba howitzers please?
I know that the issue of compressing the core with explosives was one of the most difficult issues they faced in the Manhattan Project.
Any relation to Ted?
Around 4:00 you explain that the shorter distances in an implosion device mean that the time between onset and maximum criticality is very short. But how is this achieved? With a shorter 'barrel' I expect lower implosion speed of the pit when being compressed. The compression phase lasts about 5μs?
It's cool and all, but are you also going to talk a little bit about powerplants?
I see I've made the YT algo nuke-crazy in 2023 :D ... happy to see these Manley classics again!
This subject seems to be filled with contradictory terms like "explosive lens" "levitated pit" or "sub critical mass"
If my math teacher had told me calculus could be used to calculate the curve of explosives to produce fission I'd have learned it. Instead I did worksheets about nothing and learned nothing. 'Murica