Oppy...

I'm with you - I'll stream it when available and pause it as many times as necessary. Three hours is a bit excessive. Whatever happened to movie intermissions, e.g. Lawrence of Arabia?

 

There must be others, since they didn't include Lawrence of Arabia...

 

Yes, they deserve points for that.

But how did they miss 2001: A Space Odyssey?

 

Spoiler alert;

In less than ⅓ of a second the temps rose to over 13,000°f w/in a one mile radius .... and for the next 2 to 3 seconds - only things like metal coins survived - somewhat melted & fused.



the ghouls come out of the woodwork to buy stuff like this

Historians claim the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. one would think we won't be around to see if this ism comes to fruition

11th century bc ... the Philistines sent Goliath into the arena to settle a national dispute. We don't do it that way now but there's something about picking a champion to win a 'war' ....
.

 

Those melted coins were apparently sold at auction by liveauctioneers.com Perhaps they would comment on your authenticity concerns.

==

I have watched Christopher's Nolan's version

Oppenheimer (2023) - IMDb

on this small computer screen, but I decline to say how. It was worth seeing, but I preferred this

Oppenheimer (TV Mini Series 1980) - IMDb

I have not seen

Manhattan (TV Series 2014–2015) - IMDb

Yet. Which has been very favorably reviewed. Books and video material abounds on this topic. It is fascinating to read about Oak Ridge in the 1940's as I spent a few years there much later. Can't tell all those stories either. A pity.

 

I'd not call anything involving 50 kg of Uranium 235 as simple, but it certainly was kludgy. Three percent of that underwent nuclear fission, of which about 1 gram was converted to energy, which made the remaining 97% disperse very rapidly.

Later pure fission designs use a lot less U235. And always implosion I think, not guns. All public knowledge, but some secret sauce remains.

Most of the hard work remains in separating the desired Uranium isotope. Four of the five known methods are described here:

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/isotope-separation-methods/

 

I'm pretty sure plutonium remains the primary fission 'spark plug' for thermodynamic weapons. My understanding is a fission-fusion-boosted version uses an under-enriched uranium cylinder filled with the 'fission stuff'. Hydrogen fission releases fast neutrons that fission the uranium cylinder that briefly (i.e., sub microseconds) hold things together while the magic occurs.

What I find amazing is the lithium-deuterium filler transforms all of the lithium into hydrogen that is already in a molecular bond with deuterium. The "Castle Bravo" test was ~3 times larger than expected because it had 1/3d of the expected fissionable lithium isotope but the neutron flux transformed the rest of the lithium isotope into hydrogen.

Bob Wilson

 

I'm disappointed. My thermodynamics classes didn't touch on this stuff at all. Didn't have a thermonuclear class choice.

I thought hydrogen fused, not fissed. It doesn't (initially) have any neutrons, though deuterium and tritium do, and some protons do get converted to neutrons in the reactions.

At bomb energies, I didn't think that any reaction components or products were molecules, just bare atom nuclei, until things eventually cool down. At these operating temperatures, thermal motion energies vastly exceed any possible molecular binding energies, so they all break apart. Even electrons break away.

Here is the wikipedia version:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo#High_yield
For cost and supply limitation reasons, they used a mixture of 40% lithium-6, thought to be the only bomb-useful reactive version, and 60% lithium-7 to fill out the rest. The later was thought to be "inert" because, while it was transmuted to lithium-8 which then decays into useful pieces, the decay normally had a half-life of about a second. In bomb-land, where the really fun stuff is over in a couple hundred nanoseconds, a one second half-life is millions of times too late. What they didn't know until this test, is that at these bomb-level energies, lithium-8 fissioned quickly enough to join the party.

 

Plutonium (239) 'pits' (central small fission initiators) are necessary for compact devices. They do not have a peaceful use as in thermonuclear reactors, unlike Uranium 235 enriched up to a sub-military level.

So, plutonium separates high tech and low-tech bomb making. If any of it can be called low tech. Also, Pu is not any easy thing to hide, and if one is not managing its allotropes well, one's gadget may underperform. It's all a terrible bother.

 

And that's before it goes boom.

 

A recent entrant to the Nuclear Club on the Korean Peninsula has seemed to have limited success in making booms, but more success in rocketry. It may inform us about what is more difficult.

 

Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons began in 1945 which was in this movie. Long on my to do list has been summarizing global atmos testing because it is an efficient way to to globally disperse radioactive elements. So, I did that.

The era of atmos testing peaked in 1962 with 176 'shots' (US and USSR combined) an impressive total of almost one per two days. Including the well-known 'Tsar Bomba'. If an extraterrestrial civilization were in position to observe neutrinos from Earth in 1962, it would have seen something most peculiar.

Up to then, a total of 403 million tons of TNT explosive equivalent had been shot. It doubled atmospheric concentrations of carbon 14, and increased hydrogen 3 (tritium) one-hundred fold. Other interesting radioactive elements were also dispersed globally; not summarized here. People outside that competitive spree caused the adoption of an atmospheric test-ban treaty. US and USSR went underground with testing.

Not all countries signed that treaty. From 1966 to 1980, other nations shot 32 more million tons of TNT explosive equivalent into atmosphere in nuclear-weapons tests. Feeling the need, am I right?

Then ended atmos 'dispersal' testing. Other than nuclear power plants occasionally losing containment and a few other leaky processes, Earth will not again be painted in this way.

Unless global militaries decide to use what they have. Weapons with about 8000 million tons of TNT explosive equivalent are available; >18 times what has been tested to date. That would greatly diminish Earth's capacity to support life forms larger than 1 gram body size.

That is not the future Oppy hoped for.

 

Yes, I caught it earlier this week at a small all recliner theater without a child or teenager in attendance.

It is a quite impressive film with superb directing, screenplay and cinematography. The lead is a relatively unknown Irish actor who pulls it off nicely supported by dozens of familiar actors such as Matt Damon as the commanding general at Los Alamos and Emily Blunt as his wife with issues.

A couple of sex scenes between Oppenheimer and his mistress brings the R rating and is somewhat unexpected. Definitely not a kids show on any level.

It is first and foremost a biography of Oppenheimer with the Manhattan Project as background during the second hour. The film highlights Oppy as a charismatic prodigy who was acknowledged the leading American Physicist while still in his twenties. So impressive they put him in charge of the project with no previous management experience of any kind.

Apparently Germany had a two year head start and everyone knew their Jewish scientists were just as good as America's. Einstein was around but was aging and did not participate. The leading German scientist/rival was Heisenberg. Unfortunately not played by the Breaking Bad guy.

The film has very little serious technical content but holds your interest well for the first two hours through the successful atomic test. This was quickly followed by Truman ordering their use in Japan. Only the first test is depicted in detail.

This is a good time for a break if three hours at a sitting does not work for you.

In the third hour it drags a bit as we go through a protracted McCarthy era attack on Oppenheimer's integrity. He survives a Senate inquiry with last minute support from the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Overall a worthwhile adult diversion which is sure to win awards.

 

I might have said that the whole movie is framed by two hearings, a McCarthy-era one into Oppy's security clearance renewal, and a later Senate hearing on a cabinet-post bid by the guy who (may have?) set Oppy up with the earlier hearing. Most of the movie is flashback, and the Manhattan-project material is flashback². Who survived which hearing is ... well, watch the movie.

I'm still puzzling out the shifts between black & white and color. To a first approximation, I'm thinking the B&W is for events being retold by somebody in a hearing, or filtered through one person's recollection, and the color more of a "what really happened". But I don't think that's quite it; if I remember right, some of the non-flashback hearing material was B&W, and one color scene, at least, had a thoroughly impressionistic element. I haven't had the aha! yet where it all falls into place.

The hearing scenes might seem draggier the less one has experienced (or known people who've experienced) those kinds of proceedings. Finding them draggy may be an occasion for gratitude.

More than one explosion. One bigger than the others.