![]() ![]() To date, only two atomic bombs have ever been detonated in a live setting. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer (2023). How the Atomic Bombs WorkedĬillian Murphy is J. Ultimately, they pursued several methods including centrifuges, gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion, and electromagnetic separation. Because it’s chemically identical to more common uranium-238, it couldn’t be separated with conventional chemical methods and physicists at the Manhattan Project had to get creative. To get enough, scientists had to find ways to sort the 235 out from the rest of the material in a process known as enrichment. In natural uranium ore, only about 0.7% is uranium-235, or roughly one out of every 139 atoms. RELATED: Oppenheimer First Reactions: Christopher Nolan's "Stunning" New Film Praised as A "Total Knockout" The slightly lighter uranium-235 is great for fission but it’s extremely rare. If the neutron isn’t fast enough, the atom captures it and becomes uranium-239, which then decays into plutonium-239. It won’t split unless you hit it with a high energy neutron. Most of the uranium in the world, more than 99% in fact, is uranium-238 and it sucks for fission. The number that comes after an element tells you which isotope you’re dealing with, and certain isotopes are better for certain activities. The mere mention of uranium is enough to give you the willies, but not all atoms of uranium are created equally, even if they do share a first name. Having enough material to ensure that happens is called having a critical mass. To ensure a chain reaction occurs, atomic weapons are equipped with enough fissionable materials in a dense enough concentration that each new neutron formed will, on average, strike another nucleus. The trouble is, you can’t control where the neutrons go, you can only push the probabilities in your favor. When your first atom splits and releases neutrons, you want those neutrons to hit another atom and so on, in a chain reaction. One way to do that is to make the neutrons work for you. If you want a bigger boom, you want to split atoms over and over again, releasing a tremendous amount of energy all at once. If fission began too early or happened too slowly, it would have dramatically reduced the power of the explosion. ![]() Getting a whole bunch of fission to happen all at the same time was a particular challenge for the physicists of the Manhattan Project. If there aren’t any other fissionable materials nearby, that’s the end of the process. You get your hands on a fissionable atom, toss a neutron at it, and you get two smaller atoms, some energy, and a few neutrons out the other side. ![]() ![]() You might have noticed that neutrons are the beginning and end of the process. The mushroom cloud of the Trinity test in New Mexico. It also releases a couple of free neutrons and an incredible amount of energy. When it pops, it splits into two new atoms, each with about half as many protons and neutrons. For an atom of uranium-235, that gentle nudge comes from a neutron and pushes the uranium over the edge. A single additional puff of air, maybe even a gentle nudge from a passerby, is enough for it to pop. In the context of nuclear reactions, uranium-235 is like a balloon filled almost to its breaking point. More specifically, they found it in the isotopes uranium-235 and plutonium-239. The thing is, most matter wants to stay matter, so scientists had to go fishing for a special kind of stuff. RELATED: Could Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb Really Have Destroyed the World? If you could convert a chunk of matter rapidly into energy, you might be able to capture that energy in a nuclear reactor or create the most powerful class of weapon of all time. The bottom line is that there is an equivalence between mass and energy. A small part of his work determined that energy is equivalent to mass times the speed of light squared. The Explosive Power of the AtomĪs is so often the case, we can trace the atomic bomb back to Albert Einstein, it’s right inside his most famous equation. And they did it in an appropriately sci-fi fashion, by splitting the atom. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming biopic Oppenheimer tells the story of the titular physicist who became known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Under Oppenheimer's leadership, a small group of 20th century scientists created a weapon so deadly it rivals the power of science fiction doomsday devices. ![]()
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