In hydrogen bombs, both fission and fusion takes place. Nuclear fission can happen in any large nucleus after it captures a neutron. When this happens, it becomes unstable and splits into two different atoms at around half the mass and releases more neutrons, which starts a chain reaction. Low-energy neutrons can only cause fission in uranium and plutonium atoms of an odd atomic mass, like uranium-235 or plutonium-239, which releases two or three neutrons after undergoing fission. Even numbered isotopes need the incident neutron to be over one million electron volts. Besides neutrons, atoms undergoing fission release lots of heat and energy. The immense heat and pressure from this first reaction is what causes the fusion of deuterium …show more content…
The hydrogen bomb was dropped over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in northern Russia on October 30, 1961. While it was originally planned to be a one hundred megaton bomb, it had to be lowered to fifty megatons due to fears of fallout reaching inhabited areas. Despite its power being cut in half, it was still fourteen hundred times as powerful as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs combined. Due to its massive size, it served no military purpose as there was no plane that could do intercontinental flights with it. Furthermore, its weight of 27,000 kilograms (60,000 pounds) was so much that the Tu-95 plane that carried it had to have its bomb doors removed to lower the plane’s …show more content…
The first is the explosion of chemical explosives that surround a hollow sphere, or “pit,” of plutonium-239. This compresses the pit. When it is dense enough, a neutron generator injects neutrons into the pit to cause a fission chain reaction, the second explosion. These two explosion make up the nuclear primary. Since a pure primary fission would blow itself up before much of the plutonium could undergo fission. To reduce the amount of plutonium needed, the fission reaction can be “boosted.” This is accomplished by adding deuterium and tritium inside of the hollow sphere. The fission causes the hydrogen to fuse, which releases more neutrons, which causes more fission to take