DazBurger said:
br1dg3 said:
lacktheknack said:
samsonguy920 said:
Only two years? Sweden is light on atomic crime. Being caught with fissionable materials in the US would net you a much longer stay in a Fed facility.
orangeapples said:
it was only 1 atom. no one would miss it...
Would anybody miss the one town it would take with it?
I don't think splitting one atom = nuclear explosion.
I think splitting the atoms in a chunk of unstable uranium = nuclear explosion.
I have to agree, the explosion wouldn't be that big with one atom, maybe part of his street, the residual effects could be more troublesome though.
The Chernobyl problem was a two-stage explosion that only blew up the plant, and that was a fair bit of unstable uranium, but the residue went across half the planet.
You know... The first many many times that the Atom was splitted, it was by a jewish-german women, who diden't even knew that she had actually managed to split the atom before several months later she did it.
And that weren't just single atoms she was handling.
No explosions of any kind, she just discovered that she now had two different elements and a minor loss of mass, which had been converted into energy.
Some of you could do with at least
some minimal research.
You can't get an explosion just by splitting an atom...
For an explosion to happen you need a sufficient quantity of fissionable material to create an uncontrolled chain reaction. (if it's a controlled reaction you have a nuclear power plant instead of a bomb.)
OK, so a fusion bomb would work differently, but a fusion reaction requires so much energy to start that you have to use a fission bomb as a primer...
The key point about a nuclear bomb is that to create an uncontrolled chain reaction (and thus, an explosion), you need a large enough mass of material. If you don't have enough, the reaction just fizzles out and stops all by itself.
And that minimum mass is measured in kilos, not atoms (or even grams).
Sufficient material for something to blow up in the sense that an atom bomb does is quite a lot of material. (and as a result, the safest way to transport a nuclear warhead is split into several smaller parts.)
If you have enough material to run a nuclear power plant though, you also are pretty close to enough material to create a bomb. - Hence why nuclear reactors are potentially explosive.
But all of that is somewhat irrelevant when the real and much bigger risk of working with nuclear material is radioactivity.
A person in England tried to build a reactor in their garden shed using material taken out of smoke detectors...
But, being rather careless with it, and not owning any radiation detection equipment, he didn't shield his stash of material, or his improvised reactor very well.
As a result, he came very close to killing himself, and killing or seriously harming everyone living nearby,
not by the risk of anything blowing up, but by the far more insidious risk of radiation poisoning. (Which, amongst other things eventually killed Marie Curie, one of the early researchers working with radioactive materials.)
