The WWHHHYYYYYYYYY Thread

[Shinova]

As I come across more WWHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY moments, I'll post them here. But for our first WHY moment:



Why can't fusion bombs be less than 100KT?

[Nephtys]

Isn't the point of making a fusion bomb is to enhance it's yield? If we wanted a lower-yield deal, we'd have a cheaper fission bomb for the job.

[Vanas]

Waitwaitwait. Smaller fusion bombs? And go against years of building the biggest bombs humanly possible?
But, I'd imagine it's because you need a certain lower limit of reactants to actually make an explosion.

[Nephtys]

But small bombs are easy and convenient and excusable to use! It's like Shake and Bake. But with nukes. (and I helped!)

[2000AD]

Whyyyyyyy are Newcastle letting Craig Bellamy rejoin the team?

Where's the logic in letting an openly disruptive team influence, who is a bad tempered little brat back in the team?

[Sriad]

As I come across more WWHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY moments, I'll post them here. But for our first WHY moment:



Why can't fusion bombs be less than 100KT?

In order to get the fuel for fusion bombs to fuse, it has to be insanely hot, like 10s of millions of degrees. Think "core of the sun." To get it that hot and pressurized, you basically need to detonate a fission bomb around the fusion fuel.

[Aaron]

In order to get the fuel for fusion bombs to fuse, it has to be insanely hot, like 10s of millions of degrees. Think "core of the sun." To get it that hot and pressurized, you basically need to detonate a fission bomb around the fusion fuel.

Thats how fusion bombs work though. They use a fission bomb to iniate fusion.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Until someone creates a fourth generation nuke that doesn't require fission to initiate the fusion stage, the best you can do is have a magnetic or laser confinement reactor act as one big bomb instead. Tad expensive and a bit hard to deliver to a target.

[Plekhanov]

Whyyyyyyy are Newcastle letting Craig Bellamy rejoin the team?

Where's the logic in letting an openly disruptive team influence, who is a bad tempered little brat back in the team?

he's not being let back in he's been ordered to attend pre-season training and I was under the impression that it’s a negotiation ploy to up the price Celtic, Blackburn and the rest will have to stump up to sign the little bastard.

[Shinova]

Okay, my next WHY moment:


Someone said there's an upper limit to how much energy can be produced by ANY fusion reaction. Is that true?

[Surlethe]

Okay, my next WHY moment:


Someone said there's an upper limit to how much energy can be produced by ANY fusion reaction. Is that true?

Uh, yeah. The absolute upper limit is the mass of the fuel times the speed of light squared.

[Kuroneko]

Uh, yeah. The absolute upper limit is the mass of the fuel times the speed of light squared.

True, but there is actually a much lower upper limit. Nuclear fusion plays on the difference of binding energies in the nuceli of different elements, which stabilize at iron, past which there is a net loss. Since there are only finitely many combinations of reactants, the absolute upper limit is whatever combination (or reaction chain, since the products could be fusionable) has the largest yield per mass. This should be hydrogen, which is still only about a percent of reactant mass.