HED physics

Originally posted by Truth1000...there have been some very interesting physical theories of some particular components of sub-atomic structures that could be as big of a step forward from the weapons we have as the atomic bombs were to the conventional bombs of their day.

Are we talking nuclear isomers, antimatter, muon catalysis, quark-gluon imbalance or "x"? I know of work on a number of fronts that could fit. Not sure how NIF comes into play if so - and like most things, anything that could trigger a fusion reaction is good enough by itself.

And then there's always "Proteus", but it's already fielded.

Hmm.....I always thought nuetron generators and Tritium were responsible for enhancing a nuclear yeild. Especially regarding the B-61 drop bomb. I'm sure they could yeild 10 kiloton of explosive power (mod 7). After all, they were dial a yeild weapons systems.

Originally posted by brilab45
Hmm.....I always thought nuetron generators and Tritium were responsible for enhancing a nuclear yeild. Especially regarding the B-61 drop bomb. I'm sure they could yeild 10 kiloton of explosive power (mod 7). After all, they were dial a yeild weapons systems.

Neutron generators and gaseous tritium are components of the primary - the neutron tube is responsible for supplying a few neutrons to the supercritical mass near the end of the compression phase. Gaseous tritium and deuterium from the boost system is injected into the mass just before compression - it actually undergoes fusion at the beginning of the detonation. The energy it provides is sometimes less than it takes to set it off - it's a net energy loss to a very slight gain depending on design - but it generates a huge number of fast neutrons that give you much more complete fission.

The fusion secondary has no free tritium - it makes tritium in place by transmuting lithium-6.

Originally posted by Bedlam

Originally posted by brilab45


Neutron generators and gaseous tritium are components of the primary - the neutron tube is responsible for supplying a few neutrons to the supercritical mass near the end of the compression phase. Gaseous tritium and deuterium from the boost system is injected into the mass just before compression - it actually undergoes fusion at the beginning of the detonation. The energy it provides is sometimes less than it takes to set it off - it's a net energy loss to a very slight gain depending on design - but it generates a huge number of fast neutrons that give you much more complete fission.

The fusion secondary has no free tritium - it makes tritium in place by transmuting lithium-6.

Thanx, its been a while since I worked on them. What about the claim of a one kiliton explosion. I know for a fact they yeild higher explosive capabilities. Also, did the U.S. in the recent years "un-retire" these weapons and which models are back in circulation?

reply to post by brilab45


Sandia is working on really small fission weapons.

As far as thermonukes go, they also won the contracts for the newer "no maintenance" designs, towards which some of this research at NIF is aimed.

A lot of designs have been retired, we only field a handful of different designs now. The new Sandia weapons are going to be interesting. They've been testing parts of the design for a few years - occasionally you see some whiny news article about LLNL or Sandia "blowing up depleted uranium IN THE US!!", those are invariably tests of a new primary configuration, although the journalists never seem to catch on.

reply to post by Truth1000


Perhaps, thinking that you may create a (useable?, controled yield nutron?) bomb prior to the competition, or perhaps more that you would be battle ready with such munitions/delivery to launch an all out war prior to them, you would suppose that TPTB would hit hard and fast, fearing the opposition may do same if given the time, or simply that the opposition may already be 'winning' or diminishing your existing power structure/supply chain too rapidly for any other type of response or the hope that if they overtook you in other ways you may not get another chance to strike and halt their advances?

What if, for example, stalling on a strike or defence-first strategy meant that you gave the opposition time to impact on your power significantly enough to threaten your continued control of the entire program, weapons and power to boot, either from their matching you with the same program/weapons or through other events...? Then you must strike first to maintain control of your empire and dominance?

Scary really...wonder what all that hand-shaking with Russia was about...?

reply to post by Bedllam


Reagan started non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Strange that Sandia National Labs requieted their weapons arsenal. You realize that we never did have nuclear deproliferation. Sandia leased thier weapons to the Air Force. We don't even own our own weapons!

I hate that we are just as much of liars as our cold war adversaries. We are just as evil as we ever were.

I hate the cold and heated war about to happen. Damn good thing we have more weapons than the world thinks we have.

reply to post by curioustype


What makes you think we are interested in using the potentially new devices on Russia? I would expect that if my suspicions are correct, we want some nukes for use in "unique situations" wherever they might be needed.

Originally posted by Bedlam

Originally posted by mbkennel

Can you elaborate on

a) "that stuff" (dense plasma?)
b) "going to need"
c) "soon"

Please continue to discuss actual physics.

a) energetic plasma physics as relates to fusion
b) we're going to need a deeper understanding of it
c) in order to pursue fusion power as a viable resource

d) I have been.

I see no evidence that NIF has any substantial utility for practical fusion for electrical energy production. The justifications and experiments seem like political smokescreen primarily (as the vast majority of budget is for NNSA experiments). The power-generation concepts seem far too speculative and exceptionally impractical. They make ITER seem like a hoary-old battle-tested coal-burning plant.

Am I wrong?

Let me rephrase: Is there any substantial
a) civilian-power-generation
b) national-security
utility to the NIF OTHER than calibrating simulation codes and general physics understanding for maintenance and design of thermnuclear secondaries? (using standard physics of fluid dynamics/radiative transfer, equations of state and conventional nuclear reactions)

Personally I think that fission power is the only thing which will work, for fundamental reasons: nuclei are charged, neutrons aren't, E&M has long-range interactions, strong force doesn't, scattering causes chaos & hence heat, and the 2nd law always wins.

Comments?

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Originally posted by Bedlam

Originally posted by Truth1000
Look at the history of sub-atomic physics. There had been a lot of theory, research, and debate for decades. Then, WW II comes along, and it goes from theory to a fission bomb in four years, with the expenditure of huge sums of money. Later, as a side-effect, we also built fission nuclear power plants.

I don't want to get in trouble, so I won't say much. It's a lot worse than you think.

While WW2 was happening, physics kept a'goin' faster than you know, and THAT is the real conspiracy theory that most of the 'good ones' rotate around, from the Philadelphia Experiment to 'triangles'.

I'll say there's no reason to expect that in the last 60 years, all we've gotten out of science are bigger or more oddball nukes. And like Forrest Gump, that's about all I want to say about that.

Are there terms on the 'right hand side' of the Einstein equation beyond the known stress-energy tensors with standard value of gravitational coupling G?

Does that suggest that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics supercedes the mere laws made by Congress?

When has the Executive Branch ever circumvented the Legislative oversight? [please sense sarcasm]

Originally posted by mbkennel
I see no evidence that NIF has any substantial utility for practical fusion for electrical energy production. The justifications and experiments seem like political smokescreen primarily (as the vast majority of budget is for NNSA experiments). The power-generation concepts seem far too speculative and exceptionally impractical. They make ITER seem like a hoary-old battle-tested coal-burning plant.

Energetic plasma physics are a surprise a minute at our current levels of understanding.

NIF's primary mission is to explore what is required for ignition - by that method, grant you, but we'll still get a lot of info out of it.

If we understood as much as we thought we did, we'd have Tokamaks providing commercial power. It never quite seems to work the way we expect.

But as far as that goes, Bussard's ICF project was churning out a lot of useful data during the time that Naval Weapons had the project, it was just one of those things the government cut funding for at an inopportune time.

Originally posted by mbkennel
Are there terms on the 'right hand side' of the Einstein equation beyond the known stress-energy tensors with standard value of gravitational coupling G?

Can relative permeability and permittivity be reduced below 1.0 in a vacuum?

Are we in a Machian or a deSitter universe?

Is charge strongly conserved, or only as a product with parity? Is it even then?

Lots of fun questions. Ken Edwards wasn't blue skying in 2004. And yes, these aren't directly related, two different projects.

Originally posted by Bedlam

Originally posted by mbkennel
Are there terms on the 'right hand side' of the Einstein equation beyond the known stress-energy tensors with standard value of gravitational coupling G?

Can relative permeability and permittivity be reduced below 1.0 in a vacuum?

Maybe effectively there are "negative index of refraction" materials, but this is effective as a result of 'nanoengineering' and is valid only for a limited range of E&M frequencies. It isn't fundamental physics, but it is a cool materials science trick.

I am unaware of anything which achieves what you are discussing at a fundamental level, and don't understand the relation to my question.

Are we in a Machian or a deSitter universe?

if "dark energy" is real it looks more like deSitter I'd guess.

Then again, there's this.

www.springerlink.com...

Pioneer and flyby anomaly. Real or not?

arxiv.org...

Is charge strongly conserved, or only as a product with parity? Is it even then?

Lots of fun questions. Ken Edwards wasn't blue skying in 2004. And yes, these aren't directly related, two different projects.

I don't know what to make of your other responses, but wasn't CP violation observed in the 1960's? I had Val Fitch in freshman physics.

Re Ken Edwards, do you mean this?

www.dtic.mil...

It seems to be still "conventional physics" but advanced engineering (microwaves as replacement for spark plugs in internal combustion engines).

You didn't answer 'yes' or 'no', I noticed.

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Originally posted by mbkennel
I don't know what to make of your other responses, but wasn't CP violation observed in the 1960's? I had Val Fitch in freshman physics.

No lie! That would have been great.

My profs were all laser guys for the most part, no Nobel prize winners. Not sure why, there's a lot of laser crap going on there, luck of the draw I guess.

Where were you at, Columbia?

Originally posted by mbkennel
I am unaware of anything which achieves what you are discussing at a fundamental level, and don't understand the relation to my question.

It doesn't - but it relates to what I was saying.

Re Ken Edwards, do you mean this?

Nope - Ken Edwards was the directory of "revolutionary munitions" at Eglin back in 2004. He sponsored some think tanks that were thought to be pointless blue-skying by the public, did some pitching for concepts for an impossible weapons platform. What he got back was classified and he got in pretty hot water, damned with faint praise sort of thing, because it wasn't so impractical as everyone thought.

You didn't answer 'yes' or 'no', I noticed.

Not talking about GR - it's not germane to the thing I was being oblique about. I think the last time I dusted off the stress-energy tensor on ATS was in a geek fight with Neon Haze a couple years back. I ended up having to get Steve Carlip to referee. That was fun.

Originally posted by Bedlam

Originally posted by mbkennel
I am unaware of anything which achieves what you are discussing at a fundamental level, and don't understand the relation to my question.

It doesn't - but it relates to what I was saying.

Re Ken Edwards, do you mean this?

Nope - Ken Edwards was the directory of "revolutionary munitions" at Eglin back in 2004. He sponsored some think tanks that were thought to be pointless blue-skying by the public, did some pitching for concepts for an impossible weapons platform. What he got back was classified and he got in pretty hot water, damned with faint praise sort of thing, because it wasn't so impractical as everyone thought.

Perhaps this?

www.niac.usra.edu...

www.dtic.mil...

Maybe now I'm getting it. There are plasmas other than protons and electrons.

From the paper:

There are no advantages to using antimatter as an energy delivery mechanism if efficiency or total yield is a consideration because we know of nowhere to mine positrons or antiprotons.
However, if penetration, speed of delivery, leaving no trace, and micro-radian aiming precision are of concern, the gamma ray laser is paramount. Besides that, the possibility of using the laser as a trigger for actinide-free fusion hint at the solution to the world’s energy problems and offer a way for us to defend the US without quibbling about fall-out.

I thought the JASONs really shredded the metastable hafnium idea (not the same thing, but easier to keep than positrons).

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While it is a bit off-topic, since we have such knowledgable people here, let me ask this question:

Why was there a Li-6 vs Li-7 controversy, and what was it all about? I once had two guys that I sort of knew at the Cape, and they were really going at each other about it. Both were some of those guys that usually didn't say much, unless you were a physicist. When I asked one of them later, he said he really couldn't say much about it, and that was the end of the conversation. I've read some that there was a shortage of Li-6, but that the -6 and -7, while not totally interchangeable, are both successful as long of the tritium volume was adjusted accordingly. Am I just totally overlooking something, or am I just not thinking at a high enough technical level?

I've never had anyone I felt that could answer this, but you guys seem bright enough, and highly trained enough, to answer this rather curious but unimportant question I've had for more than a decade.

Originally posted by mbkennel

Perhaps this?

www.niac.usra.edu...

www.dtic.mil...

Maybe now I'm getting it. There are plasmas other than protons and electrons.

Yeah, that's the "somewhat poorly understood sort of plasma physics" a dozen posts upthread. More of an ambiplasma issue, although not so much a NIF thing as a question aimed at truth1000's inferences.

(starts tapdancing)

Edwards' interest in 'how might we use positrons' wasn't as dim or timewasting as one might immediately think. (wince) Let's obliquely consider. Current production of positrons involves either natural production through certain decay paths, or pair production in accelerators, neither of which are efficient enough to be worth doing, except for research purposes in the small.

If one had a black box, and when an electron passed through, out the other side of the box came (with some inefficiency and a great deal of energy) a positron. Ignoring the contents of the box, is the transformation allowed by charge conjugation?

edit: also thus my oblique statement about c, cp, cpt violation

I thought the JASONs really shredded the metastable hafnium idea (not the same thing, but easier to keep than positrons).

I always liked the concept of nuclear isomers - so did the military - not sure if it was dropped totally or no.



[edit on 27-6-2010 by Bedlam]

Originally posted by Truth1000
Why was there a Li-6 vs Li-7 controversy, and what was it all about?

Ah. The Castle Bravo surprise.

The Teller-Ulam secondary uses Li6D as fusion fuel - the Li6, under intense neutron bombardment, produces tritium in situ. It's a nice, compact way to "store" tritium which would otherwise require cryogenics.

Most lithium is Li7. At the time of the Castle Bravo test shot, it was thought that only the Li6 part of the secondary assembly would produce tritium, and the Li7 would be essentially inert. Surprisingly, it turned out that there was a nuclear reaction by which Li7 would also produce tritium under certain circumstances, which came to pass during the Castle Bravo shot. They got 15MT instead of the 5-7 they were expecting.