So I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I haven’t really been able to answer my question no matter how much I look into it, I was wondering if you guys could help.
So I was wondering, the critical mass of nuclear material is easier to achieve if the material is denser. I’m also aware that this is kinda how some nuclear bombs work, by launching a chunk of material at more material to cause the explosion. (I think?)
So in that case, what would happen if you grabbed a ball of Uranium or Einsteinium and threw it at the ground hard enough? Would it go critical? If so, how hard would you have to throw it and how big would the ball need to be?
As an optional bonus if all the aforementioned is possible, if the mass of Uranium were say, the size of a bullet, how fast would you need to fire the bullet in order to achieve criticality by kinetic impact alone?
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No. Whilst you can theoretically achieve criticality by compressing a sub critical mass, there’s two reasons this wouldn’t work just by throwing a blob
The obvious one is that no human is even remotely in the neighborhood of being strong enough to through anything that hard
The second reason, even if you were strong enough, it you threw a lump of plutonium against something that hard (and assuming the thing you throw it against doesn’t just break away), you still won’t achieve compression, because the lump of plutonium will heat the object and then just disintegrate, sort of like throwing a tomato at a wall really hard: you don’t get a compressed tomato when you do that, you just get chunks of tomato everywhere. To actually achieve criticality, the pressure has to be coming very evenly from all sides to prevent the material from scattering.
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