pstemari@bismark.cbis.com (Paul J. Ste. Marie) wrote:
Mark Terka wrote:
Not to mention the fact that without tritium, the "trigger" for nuclear weapons (and extremely expensive and rare at $ 100m a gram) all you have is a radioactive paperweight.
The "trigger" isn't tritium. Tritium (along with lithium 6) is used in fusion bombs. A fission-only device, ala Hiroshima or Nagasaki, doesn't require any.
The trigger in the center of the plutonium core is a neutron source, polonium if memory serves correctly. Tritium is a beta emitter.
A neutron source is usually a light element with a high neutron/proton ratio, coupled with an alpha emitter. I believe the Nagasaki bomb used beryllium-9. An alpha particle impacting a beryllium nucleus will fuse with it, forming carbon-12, and the binding energy will eject a neutron. I think aluminum and a few other light elements will undergo similar reactions to release neutrons in the presence of alpha particles. Polonium is primarilly an alpha emitter. It would work as part of a neutron source, but it is not a particularily good choice because its half-life is only 138.4 days (polonium-210). This makes it expensive to obtain, and impractical to store.