Talk:Nuclear explosion

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 January 2021 and 7 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Hookecho, YOSHI6410.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:27, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Why does it even explode?

As far as I can see there is nothing inherently explosive about nuclear fission. Is it simply the generated heat that causes the air to expand, or what is the "thing" which turns the bomb into an explosion rather than merely a bit of melted or gaseous fission products? This information should be in the article. -- 77.7.136.151 (talk) 16:00, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

All explosions of which I am aware are the result of the "generated heat that causes the air to expand", as long as you allow any gas to be called "air". What really makes it an explosion is that the parts (gaseous or not) exceed the speed of sound at some point, which contains the explosion momentarily and allows it to build up a shockwave. Nuclear explosives do it by heating of the fireball using soft x-rays. SkoreKeep (talk) 17:25, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Can there be a nuclear explosion in a reactor?

In a reactor that isn't meant to explode, can there be a nuclear explosion in case of a meltdown? Or are any possible explosions at a nuclear plant merely chemical explosions, like those hydrogen explosions at Fukushima? -- 77.7.136.151 (talk) 16:03, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

It can't really explode nuclearly, but it certainly cab get hot enough that other materials do the expanding and case an explosion. The prime example is, of course, Chernobyl reactor #4, where the water coolant was the materials that was heated and turned to steam violently enough to blow the concrete top off the reactor vessel. SkoreKeep (talk) 17:53, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Nuclear explosions only ever intentional?

According the the lead sentence, "A nuclear explosion occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from an intentionally high-speed nuclear reaction". According to Chernobyl disaster#Experiment and explosion there were two explosions in the plant: the first a steam explosion, and a few seconds later, a more powerful explosion that was presumably caused by a nuclear excursion. On the scale of nuclear explosions, it was hardly powerful, due to the long insertion time, but surely it still counts as an unintentional nuclear explosion?

Why would this article say that nuclear explosions can only be intentional? Fuzzypeg★ 02:39, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

No, it doesn't. Both explosions were essentially heat physics at work, though either of them might have included a component of what is known as "nuclear excursion", or a high nuclear flux period in which nuclear reactions created the heat which drove the explosions. It is doubtful that the excursions created any large amount of the soft x-rays that drive true nuclear explosions, but they did generate the heat that caused the water to flash to steam and then melt the reactor contents.

The essential difference between a bomb and a reactor is that a portion of the reactor chain reactions happen with delayed neutron generation. If it reacted as fast as a bomb does, generating 100 chain reaction generations in a microsecond, there would be no way to control it; like a bomb it would just explode when it reached criticality. The use of much less enriched fuel, the inclusion of a lot more U-238 which absorbs neutrons and reacts much more slowly, is what makes control of the reactor possible. See delayed neutrons. One balances a reactor on a sort of knife edge in which almost enough prompt neutrons are emitted to sustain the chain reaction, and then the slowed release of delayed neutrons is the throttling mechanism. And the balance is achieved in the composition of the fuel. SkoreKeep (talk) 17:53, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Questionable Info

The part "The main health effect of nuclear fallout is cancer and birth defects because radiation causes changes in cells that can either kill or make them abnormal.[12] Any nuclear explosion (or nuclear war) would have wide-ranging, long-term, catastrophic effects. Radioactive contamination would cause genetic mutations and cancer across many generations." is questionable information - it would take a very large number of nuclear explosions to cause nuclear winters, as evidenced by the fact that a hundred nuclear tests did not do so. The same argument can be given for radiation effects.