hydrogen combustion gun

[Marffy]

People even run their cars off the hydrogen they make. discuss.

I think you're referring to "HHO" from home grown electrolysis cells. People DON'T run their cars on it. The only add it to the engine as a supplement......with mixed results. If you're planning on handling HHO gas, you might think about booking your hospital room (or mortician) in advance! That s*** is seriously dangerous!

i was thinking about that too. since its such a explosive gas i might as well give up with this whole idea. I can't even make a combustion potato cannon so i dont even know why i made this post. i can't weight till i'm 18.

[jimmy101]

Jumbo was designed to contain the explosion in the event of a fizzle. Plutonium was valuable enough that they didn't want to lose it in the event the bomb didn't go correctly. If it did, the container would go away. If it didn't, the bomb would be contained.

So... you're correct: Jumbo would not contain a proper Trinity blast but in the same breath, Jumbo was designed to contain a Trinity blast should that blast go less than optimally.

In a "fizzle" there is minimal nuclear reaction, typically the "nuclear" part of the explosion is similar in magnitude to the conventional explosive trigger. It's just a thermal explosion caused by a small amount of nuclear activity. Basically the critical mass undergoes a thermal expansion that spreads the fissile material out enough to dampen (and stop) the chain reaction. The resulting energy is about the same as the triggering explosion, within a factor of a couple or so. Since some fission nucs are built such that the metal containment sort of survives the pretty serious conventional explosion used to slam the piece of fissile material together, the containers tend to be fairly robust. Still, if the device goes "nuclear" at more than just a few hundredths of a percent efficiency the container is irrelevant.

A typical nuc has pretty low efficiency. IIRC, 1 to 10% is normal. Still, that corresponds to many killotons of TNT equivalent. That's millions of pounds of TNT.

In the case of plutonium's bombs, it's interesting that the oft cited concern was saving the precious plutonium instead of keeping the extremely toxic plutonium from getting spread over a big chunk of the US.

[rcman50166]

Voila