HOWTO Build a Nuclear Device

[Tim May]

On Saturday, November 17, 2001, at 12:18 AM, baptista at pccf.net wrote:

>
> Now - i've replied to you below - but I think were missing the point of
> the post.  So i'll repeat - it's easy to do harm when you have the will 
> to
> die to rally your cause - as we have seen on sept 11.  and i find it
> regrettable that conditions exist in which people use extreme methods
> to focus the people of this planet on the fact that western governments
> are basically evil.

Look, people respond to points they are interested in responding to. 
That I didn't comment on your political point about "will to die to 
rally our cause" point does not mean I didn't "miss the point." It just 
is such an obvious point as to be unexceptionable.

More interesting to me was picking apart your "stainless steel bowls 
bomb."

>
>> Nearly all metals are malleable to some extent (in that they don't
>> shatter when subjected to shear forces), but I was responding to your
>> "beat the metal in a stainless steel bowl" idea. Good luck on beat U
>> this way!
>
> Possible - never build one myself.  I would assume that if it is harder 
> to
> work then gold - then just get very thick stanless steel bowls.  I'm 
> sure
> you'd need a few trials to figure it out.

A true understatement. Try beating a piece of uranium!

(From the rigidity modulus tables, and Young's modulus tables, you can 
find comparable metals to experiment with.)

This is why most such hemispheres and hemispherical sections are made 
with molds and slurries of fissionables. Getting uniformity by "beating" 
a fairly hard metal is not easy.

>
>> The chunks of uranium I used to work with were pure metallic...and dark
>> grey/black.
>
> sounds unrefined or badly oxidized.  I've never seen chunks of
> uranium.  Was this in it's unrefined state.  What was it
> exactly.  Pitchblende?

Pure metallic uranium, both in the natural abundances and in the pure 
U-238 (DU) form.

--Tim May
"The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the 
expense of everyone else." --Frederic Bastiat