Can someone explain the feared runaway nuclear reaction that Oppenheimer presented Einstein in the film? The one where detonating a nuke would’ve exploded the whole world?
Wouldn’t that scenario require many orders of magnitude more energy than the output of the what the first (or current) nuclear weapons were capable of?
In: Physics
Short tl;dr
Atmosphere is full of nitrogen
If nitrogen get very very hot it can fuse which creates energy
If you explode bomb then nitrogen fusion will happen
Question is; Does the bomb lose more energy from just normal thermal radiation than it can possible get from nitrogen fusion?
Answer: Yes no matter what the temperature is, you always get more thermal loss than fusion gain, and thus a run-away reaction is not possible. But it took some math to actually prove that.
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