How does nuclear explosion affect the underwater wildlife?
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If you are talking about the tests the Americans and others did in the Pacific this is the answer.
Nuclear bombs are very efficient and leave significantly less radiation than meltdowns.
Chernobyl had nuclear fuel burning in open air for a few days. Nasty isotopes like strontium-90 and iodide-131 got in the air and fell out around the area, making dangerous.
Nukes emit very large amounts of radiation in the form of high energy neutrons at the point of the explosion, however this is not an issue a few hours later. Nasty isotopes are left behind but if underwater would flow with currents and be a minor issue for wildlife but not massive. Nothing like what Chernobyl did
Same as any explosion, just on a far greater scale/range. It kills it.
More blast damage (as water is not compressible), way less range for any thermal output (water opacity and all the heat going into heating that water), radiation would be drastically scaled back due to water being really good shielding.
It doesn’t, really. Of course anything thats right next to the blast is screwed, just like anything hit by the direct blast on the land. But water is so hard to compress and the change of water into steam uses up so much energy that the explosion will make a big initial splash and then just stop. It has no chance to have any meaningful effect.
Imagine the tsar bomba was detonated at the seabed 11km underwater. The pressure at these depths are extremely high, over 11,000psi. However, nuclear explosions generate over tens of millions of psi which overcomes the water pressure.
The fireball (which expands at over 300km/s but slows down the larger it gets), generates a shockwave that travels through the water, creating a hydrostatic shock hundreds of thousands of psi in the vicinity of the explosion, destroying marine life by rupturing organs.
While the heat is nowhere near what can be achieved if the bomb was detonated in air (not hundreds of millions of degrees celcius), since water has a high specific heat capacity, the temperatures nearby still rise to well over a couple hundred degrees, killing all marine life. Many millions of tons of water will be vaporised in the process.
In the end you’ll get a large region of hot radioactive water that rises to the ocean surface.
It absolutely devastates it.
US Underwater nuclear tests in Alaska, and French tests in French Polynesia wiped out all aquatic life on an absolutely massive scale that even 60 years later it is still nowhere near recovered.
Underwater nuclear explosions do so much damage underwater that the [nuclear regulatory commission in a 2015 report](https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/er-2015-0039) described it as an extreme threat to local biodiversity.
To understand why nuclear blasts are so much more devastating under water, we need to look at how the blast travels.
Water being much more dense than air means it transfers energy much more efficiently. this means that while the nuclear blast above ground spend much more energy on transferring outwards, this translated to be being limited to the speed of sound, But because water is so much more dense, and also virtually uncompressible, the speed of sound is almost 300% faster under water.
This is why you can hear a sonar ping at “just” 140 decibel over 300 miles away under water, That would be like standing in Baltimore and being able to hear a jet plane take off in New Jersey.
Now, keep in mind, a nuclear explosion is all the way up at 278 decibels. Your lungs rapture at just 170 decibels.
Now also keep in mind that the energy or sound blast from the nuclear explosion under water travel close to an incredible 1500 meters a second, or close to one mile per second.
Ooooooohhh….. who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
While the immediate effects of the explosion would kill absolutely everything in the local area, the lingering effects (i.e. radiation and fallout) would be negligible.
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