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Stimulated Gamma Decay Weapons
ExRex writes "New Scientist is reporting on a USDOD project to produce super explosives. 'An exotic kind of nuclear explosive being developed by the US Department of Defense could blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons. The work has also raised fears that weapons based on this technology could trigger the next arms race.'"
Because you have to pump energy into the system to get any back out. At best, it would be a way to increase the efficiency of existing power generators (nuclear plants, solar panels, etc).
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--Mike--
Maybe they weren't used in the way they were designed to be, but they were indeed used. The only thing deterring the Soviet Union was the understanding that if they went to war with the U.S., they would be utterly destroyed. I would submit that our nuclear stockpiling is the sole reason why the Soviets didn't take over the world.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
You raise a good point, but...
Energy density != Energy efficiency.
You want the former for weapons, the latter for commercial energy production.
(Although in the case of fuel substitutes for cars, both are actually quite important. No matter how much you improve the efficiency and cost of hydrogen or fuel cells, its hard to beat oil's energy density.)
Anyway, based on that article, it appears to me that it takes a heck of a lot of energy to make and "energize" the halfnium with protons (or eventually photons). A lot more than you get out when you eventually shoot the X-Ray in and get that 60-fold increase out. That 60-fold increase is just releasing energy you put in the substance gradually earlier. So it isn't necessarily energy efficient, just energy-dense. Of course, as they make the substance cheaper, that is a sign that they're improving the energy efficiency of the manufacturing process, so who knows how good they'll get at that. Clearly they have a long way to go in any case. Particle accelerators aren't cheap, either dollar-wise or energy-wise.
Well, it's a way to store energy, perhaps, but it can't act as a source in and of itself. Excited-state nuclei aren't just lying around in the ground--they tend to have short half-lives, from decades down to the tiniest fractions of a second. To create these metastable nuclei, you have to put in at least as much energy as you're taking out.
Mind, these metastable isotopes already have nonmilitary uses. Technetium-99m has long been used as a radioactive tracer in medicine. It is produced from the decay of molybdenum-99, and has a half-life of about six hours.
~Idarubicin
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Excerpts from the story:
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
You could produce a small yield neutron bomb and do the same thing and be less dirty with the radioactive material.
Huh? A small-yield neutron bomb?
A neutron bomb is a fusion warhead. As such, it requires a fission warhead to set it off. A 'small yield' fission warhead is, at the very least, going to be equivalent to anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand tons of TNT, and the second stage fusion warhead, which releases the neutrons, is going to add to that. "Small-yield fusion bomb" is something of an oxymoron.
And neutron bombs are rather dirty, indeed. In addition to the fallout from the fission primary, the intense neutron flux transmutes many substances, notably metals, in the surrounding area into radioisotopes. Some of those will have rather long half-lives.
The slower it is (and the more they see), the more people remember that war is dumb.
The History Channel had a documentary about one Christmas day during World War One, where the German and Allied soldiers started singing carols and eventually met each other for a one-day Christmas cease fire (they even held soccer matches with eachother). After that day, they had trouble gathering the motivation to kill eachother, and the military leaders basically had to force the war to continue.
Any war relies on de-humanizing the enemy, which is most often a large collection of ordinary people under different circumstances and under the leadership of a psychopath (Adolph Hitler, Osama bin Laden, etc.).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
The "Davy Crockett" is more accurately described as a portable recoilless rifle launched nuke. It's about the same size as a more modern TOW setup, can go on a tripod. It probably took 4 or 5 guys to carry all the stuff on foot, so it's not really a bazooka (an anti-tank weapon).
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It had a "dial a yield" warhead from 10 to 250(1) Tons of TNT. The higher settings would cause almost certain death to the launch crew as the lethal radiation kill zone was much farther than the maximum range of even the biggest launcher (2 miles or so).
One of the new thingies or an old Davy Crockett might be a good device to wipe out a bunch of tanks out in a desert, but it's still a friggin huge weapon compared to the precision stuff used nowdays. (I doubt any army will be dumb enough to go head-to-head against the US Army in desert tank battle for a looonngg time. Even the Iraqis didn't try it a second time.)
Here's some links with pictures:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nucl
http://www.guntruck.com/DavyCrockett.html
During routine maintenance, a filter was removed from part of the plant and not replaced. The shift changed, the missing filter was not noticed and evaporators which dried anthrax into spores were switched on.
A cloud of anthrax was blown across the city, dozens of people died. The Soviet government panicked (it should not have been manufacturing anthrax in the first place) and first of all denied that there had been an anthrax outbreak. When that proved untenable - even the tame Soviet press was asking questions, they said there had been an outbreak but it was caught from infected meat (not entirely impossible).
IIRC, the truth only came out when the Soviet Union had imploded and Yeltsin confirmed the cause.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It's not a conspiracy, it's just not advertised. FYI the anthrax that was getting mailed to democrats and liberals (did no one in the mainstream media make this connection?) previously was made in a military facility located in Utah.
We have large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
Here is a non-classified breakdown by type and storage location in the US
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/cbw/cw.htm
The Bush administration has restarted our NBC weapons program, and if they are allowed to continue on this path, they WILL use them.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
Somewhat, and no I wouldn't consider most of it worthwhile but as far as practical guidance goes Cicero and Seneca are far more worthwhile than Plato.
This being Slashdot I was writing in a very imprecise manner, hence equating the achievements of all civilizations in all the areas mentioned. Of course some civilations were better than others in the areas of building, philosophy, art etc.
Well, it shouldn't matter anyway; these weapons aren't true grasers, though the principle is oddly symmetric.
A graser, like any "?aser" device works by stimulating energized electrons to transition to a lower shell immediately (instead of at a random time) by smacking another photon into it, causing the atom emit a photon (always of a certain frequency) in the same direction that the original photon was moving. The gamma decay device works by stimulating the nucleus is a very similar way with X-rays until it raises the chances that the nucleus will randomly decay.
It's kind of like a graser, but with the nucleus instead of the electron shells. That and once an atom has served its purpose once, it's no longer useable for the same trick thanks to having decayed. Though it technically fits each letter in the acronym GRASER, the gamma decay weapon deserves another name entirely.
My inner evil marketroid recommends Gradec.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The article says they're planning to make this isomer in gram quantities by shooting gamma rays into a sample of ground-state 178Hf, which is the reverse of the decay process. The problem is that the cross-section is going to be very low, for exactly the same reason: it's hard to get a photon to carry many units of angular momentum into or out of a nucleus. People have discussed making small (microgram) quantities of it for use as a high-spin target in reactor experiments, but nobody could figure out any reasonable way to do it.
You also have to realize that although the half-life of 31 years is long compared to most isomeric states, it's still relatively short compared to, say, 235U, which lives for gazillions of years. The relatively short half-life means that even if you could get a gram of this stuff, it'd be virtually impossible to handle safely. It would be much more radioactive than a subcritical mass of weapons-grade fissionables.
There's a long history of impractical ideas like this, going back to the Reagan-era idea of a gamma-ray laser. Luckily we're still only faced with the same basic bomb threats that've been around since the Kennedy administration, but that's bad enough. The real thing to worry about, IMO, is the nuclear cauldron that's shaping up in Asia: Iran, Afghanistan, India, and North Korea.
OT: Are other people finding Slashdot extremely slow and unresonsive recently? I can hardle even access it anymore.
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242-Americum has a metastable isomer with 141 years halflife, and there are probably more nuclei with a long-lived isomer.
Also, from what i can find out aboutt this weapon, it is not required to achieve population-inversion, which is different from LASERS and MASERS. Radiation is stimulated by photons diffrent in wavelength than the output wavelength.
I this case, a weapon would loose half of its effect in 31 years, but would probably not become totally ineffective due decaying below a certain 'critical point' (50% in true *ASERS).
With those factors combined, I'm not so sure a its impossible to create a durable weapon with this technology.
The article claims that the AF supplier, SRS Technologies, said that technology to provide the materials needed in "gram quantities" would be about five years away (he say they "would exist within five years").
;).
Certainly, for a project such as this, it is completely unbelievable that one of the key entities in the weapon development would give anyone and everyone a remotely precise estimate as to when larger scale production (and real weapon production) could possibly begin.
The true timeline must be years away from that. In one of the two directions possible... Which poses an interesting question: are real weapons based on this technology available today already, and did they agree to participate in the story simply to "prepare" the general public for real-world testing which will happen in the following year or two? Or do they know that others are working on this technology as well, and therefore need to tell their nation that "they're right on it", when some other country launches their tests within the next year or two?
That's speculation. Time will show.
What will be interesting to see, too, is how the real testing will commence. Currently they are working on three possibly viable materials. Most likely they will have different characteristics, and their exact effects in a real-world scenario will be impossible to simulate.
In 1945, there were two materials available for fission weapons - uranium and plutonium. One bomb was made with each, and the two bombs were dropped on each their civilian target. Hiroshima got Uranium, Nagasaki got Plutonium.
Which three cities will this new weapon be tested on? And to raise the bar, which city will get Hafnium, which one will get Thorium, and which one will get Niobium?
Oh, and don't tell me war has gone soft and that the weapon would not be tested on civilian targets this time... A gamma discharge weapon has many of the properties of a neutron weapon - it is extremely useful mostly against people (and electronics - it will kill you *and* your Aibo, oh the wonders of modern civilization
On a second note... Did anyone notice how there is no longer anything called a "neutron bomb"? It is, today, called a "low yield" bomb. In the media at least. Because it's blast and heat isn't as great as "real" fusion weapons. Neutron weapons are now almost politically correct - at least, the public wouldn't raise an eye if they were told a low-yield bomb was dropped to stop riots in some third-world city.
Now, to go find lead coating for my tinfoil hat.
It seems perhaps you are hung up on the term decay. Nuclear decay can be several things. Alpha decay, beta decay, gamma decay, fission decay. Chemical reactions also decay at a set rate. Many are just much higher order than the first order nuclear reactions. Pick up a chemical kinetics textbook sometime and read it. :)
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