What were the effects of the heavy atmospheric nuclear testing done in the 40s, 50s and 60s on life on earth? The Tsar Bomba alone had to create some seriously irreversible fallout damage for most of the planet, right?
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Tsar Bomba resulted in a very small amount of fallout compared to their yield, it is in fact the nuclear explosion with the loser fallout to yield ration.
Fallout is radioactive material that falls to the ground. It is fission produced and atoms that have been hit by neutron radiation and become radioactive elements. It is material with half lives in days or years that will have a major impact. If halflife is in second it will be gone before anyone is exposed and if is is hindered of years the intensity will be very low
Let’s first look a the neutron capture part. Tsar Bomba exploded in the air so neutrons were captured bu the atmosphere. The oxygen become radioactive nitrogen with a half-life of 7 seconds so it is quickly gone. The nitrogen primary becomes Cabon-14 with a half-life of 5700 years. The carbon will if I am not mistaken react with oxygen and you it becomes carbon dioxide so not something that falls to the ground. So air bursts do not produce elements that are especially dangerous.
If you do a gound blast then neutrons hit lots of other elements and can produce have half-life in the dangerous range. The atoms will be part of solid material so they say on the ground or fall down as dust.
The last look at the fission products. Tsar Bomba is a 3 stage design with an initial fission stage that is used to detonate a second fusion stage and it will initiate another fusion stage. 97% of the energy came from the fusion stages. The total yield is 50Mton and 1.5Mton was generated by this initial stage
Fusion produces primary light stable elements or elements with a short half-life, So the amount of fall out from they are low. The initial stage used uranium and did produce a lot of radioacvie material with half that are bad for us, but it is an air blast and the result is they spread out over a very large area.
Once again if it was a blast at ground level or with the fire ball in contact with the ground radioactive it gets worse. The radioactive element from the fission will sick to dust and other material and fall down to the ground a lot faster so you get dangerous radiation levels. You get lots of fallout if you throw up a mixture of direct and radioactive material in the air. There is a reason that even when atmospheric testing was done most were not ground detonations.
Thermonuclear weapons, that is when you have fission and fusion sages, usually have use lost of U-238 in casing pushers etc. It can’t sustain a chain reaction but is can go through fission if hit with a neutron, The fission and fusion stag do produce a lot of neutrons so by using U-238 you get extra yield and not extra weight and minimal extra cost. The yield of the initial
Tsar Bomba initially was designed that way too with a yield of 100Mton but it was changed to lead to reduce fallout and so the aircraft could get away. This reduces the yield to 50Mton. So half of the energy would have come from these diety U-238 fission. If that change was not made 26% of all fallout from nuclear resting would have be produce by this test.
The practical thermonuclear weapon uses its outer U-238 layer because you can make a smaller and lighter bomb with the same yield.
So Tsar Bomba did result in a lot less fallout than you expect because it was an air blast and not a lot of energy was released from fission.
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