this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)

Science Memes

14393 readers
65 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] PunnyName@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Ask Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In alphabetical order.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] PunnyName@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago

I stand corrected, because I done forgetted.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Those are fission. Fusion bombs don't fuse uranium. They use a fission bomb to fuse Lithium.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 0 points 2 weeks ago

Oh, they do, but not as the primary or secondary. You can wrap depleated uranium around the core to capture fast neutrons that are leftover from the rest of the process. Changing the number of layers is how you can dial in a desired yield.

[–] anindefinitearticle@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Fusion bombs use a fission bomb to fuse Hydrogen, which is why they're called H-bombs.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean if we really want to be technically accurate here, the lithium is just a moderater for the hydrogen isotopes to fuse.

But for me it gets fuzzy when looking at the reaction.

LiD is 4 protons, 8 neutrons. Add a new neutron, and bam, you have 4 protons and 9 neutrons. But that's where it gets weird to me. The lithium needs to decay or something into a tritium and dueterium which forces the tritium to fuse with the existing dueterium in the LiD molecule? Clearly the neutron has enough energy to transfer into one of the atoms to increase the chance of tunneling actually occuring.

The only real purpose of the lithium deuteride is that it's a dry, shelf-stable, room-temperature fuel. The very first hydrogen "bomb" (actually a building-sized device) used supercooled liquid hydrogen as the fusion fuel, but this was obviously not practical for a deliverable bomb.

For that matter, even the Nagasaki bomb ("Fat Man") didn't use Uranium at all - its fuel was Plutonium.