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Separating the trigger from the fuel package is a thick plug of dense material (again U or W). Experiments with particle accelerators proved the possibility of fusion reactions, but the first large fusion energy release was realised in a thermonuclear bomb. The hydrogen bomb can be considered the first successful demonstration of inertial confinement.
Basic Principles of Staged Radiation Implosion
This led to a large radioactive contamination of the east part of the Bikini atoll. By an explosion of one or several conventional auxiliary fission bombs, one hopes to establish conditions for the explosion of a “principal” bomb. The force that compresses and accelerates the fusion fuel inward is provided solely by the ablation pressure. To make use of these fuels, the slower reaction rates must be offset by compressing them to densities hundreds or thousands of times greater than those of normal conditions. At any given temperature the reaction rate goes up with the square of the density, a thousand-fold compression gives a million-fold reaction rate increase. The bomb was the first full-scale test of the Teller-Ulam design, and its explosion completely destroyed the test island Elugelab, leaving a nearly 2 km wide crater where the island had once been.
Responses to “The Infamous Teller-Ulam Report ( ”
This ablation process, essentially a rocket turned inside out, generates tremendous pressure on the fuel capsule and causes an accelerating implosion. Thermal equilibrium assures that the implosion pressure is very uniformly distributed. The transparent carbon-hydrogen plasma retards the early expansion of the tamper and casing plasmas, keeping the radiation channel from being blocked by these opaque high-Z materials until equilibrium is fully established. The first transportable US bomb was Castle Bravo, which used lithium deuteride, which is solid at room temperature. Its yield was 2.5 times greater than predicted because of unforeseen additional reactions involving lithium 7.
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Biographical Memoirs: Volume 90
The first device used to demonstrate the hydrogen bomb principle was the Greenhouse Item, detonated in 1951 on the island of the Pacific atoll Enewetak. It was not a true fission bomb and was never intended to be a weapon, but it demonstrated that the direction of thermonuclear bomb research was correct. The deuterium-tritium gas was inserted into the enriched-uranium core of the fission bomb. The neutrons generated from fusion helped to burn fissile fuel and nearly double the yield of a fission bomb. Work on the hydrogen bomb was carried out together with the fission bomb development.
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Although there were attempts to use the great energy of thermonuclear explosions for peaceful uses like heating water in underground caverns, mining or hydraulic fracking for gas mining, it was never achieved. Further innovation in miniaturizing warheads continued through the mid-1970s, however, much of the Teller-Ulam design for these weapons and older are considered a top nuclear secret. Most information in the public domain about these designs is relegated to a few terse statements by the Department of Energy and the work of a few individual investigators.
Stanford University, Winter 2015
The result of all this, though, was a report signed by Teller and Ulam titled “On Heterocatalytic Detonations I. Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors,” report # LAMS-1225, dated March 9, 1951. We’ll get to the “heterocatalytic” in a moment, but the “hydrodynamic lenses” are the initial Ulam compression scheme; the “radiation mirrors” is related to Teller’s insights with regards to radiation implosion. This is in distinction to hitherto-considered autocatalytic schemes based essentially on self-implosions of a mixture of nuclear substances. That it took Teller — and everyone else at Los Alamos — a full ten years to figure out how to solve the problem is a good indication that it was a very hard problem.
The bomb casing is roughly cylindrical, with the fission Primary (or "trigger") at one end. The fusion fuel (lithium deuteride in the diagram) is a cylinder or ellipsoid wrapped in a pusher/tamper - a layer of very dense material (uranium or tungsten). Running down the axis of the fuel cylinder is a Pu-239 or U-235 rod, 2-3 cm or so in diameter.
At the very least, it required a familiarity with nuclear reactions at energy regimes which had never been achieved previously on Earth. It also required breaking out of several wrong ideas along the way whose wrongness was not obvious. Since the D+T reaction rate is so high, and there is large excess of deuterium, the tritium is consumed almost as fast it is produced. The 14.1 MeV neutrons also produce large amounts of tritium from Li-7 through reaction 6.
The concept of a thermonuclear fusion bomb ignited by a smaller fission bomb was initially suggested by Enrico Fermi to Edward Teller in 1941during the inception of the Manhattan Project. [2] This idea caused Teller to spend most of his time during the Manhattan Project attempting to figure out how to make this concept work; neglecting his assigned work on the Manhattan Project. Teller, was able to convince his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, to join him on this idea provided by Fermi.
The fuel in the fission capsule consists of lithium deuteride that may be enriched in the Li-6 isotope (which makes up 7.5% of natural lithium). There is some tritium generated by the fission neutrons, but as noted above the contribution to bomb yield is insignificant. Far more tritium is produced by the D+D reactions, either directly by reaction 3, or by reaction 5 via the neutrons produced in reaction 2. The principles of the Teller-Ulam configuration are more easily explained with the help of the diagram below.
For the next decade, Teller would commit a significant amount of his time to the effort of trying to figure out how you could make such a thing actually work. Just prior to the conference, on May 8 at Enewetak atoll in the western Pacific, a test explosion named George had successfully used a fission bomb to ignite a small quantity of deuterium and tritium. It was immediately clear to all scientists concerned that these new ideas—achieving a high density in the thermonuclear fuel by compression using a fission primary—provided for the first time a firm basis for a fusion weapon.
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