Interesting fact about making a nuke from New Scientist

[Troll]

He also says that he’s got shed loads of ammonium nitrate that nobody wants anymore.

I heard they had altered the composition of ammonium nitrate to prevent it going pop

[threaded]

I heard they had altered the composition of ammonium nitrate to prevent it going pop

Yeah, they mix in some aluminium powder and it makes a wonderful weedkiller, especially against daisys. Doesn't go 'pop', more of a 'whump'.

[_V_]

Complete and utter b’locks. A reaction can only take place if compression is from all direction, hence why timing is the key to making a bomb. Korea is currently only get 10% of the yield because it can bot get the timing right.

From the New Scientist article:

The POGO report also argues that improvising a nuclear bomb using Y-12's highly enriched uranium would be a relatively easy task for terrorists on site. Simply dropping one 45-kilogram lump onto another from about 1.8 metres could create a 10-kiloton explosion, it says, killing or injuring up to 60,000 people. The prospect, however, is dismissed as "fanciful" by the DoE's National Nuclear Security Administration. "There are better odds that an asteroid would hit Oak Ridge," says an NNSA spokesman. "The facility is well prepared to defeat a terrorist attack."

Still Bollocks?

[bogeyman]

Complete and utter b’locks. A reaction can only take place if compression is from all direction, hence why timing is the key to making a bomb. Korea is currently only get 10% of the yield because it can bot get the timing right.

Surely that's not entirely accurate.

If you use small masses of fissile material then, yes, timing and high energy inputs, and symmetry are critical to get a runaway reaction.

If you use fecking big chunks of the stuff (which is really desperate to go critical anyway) then it doesn't take much finesse to lob them together using any old explosives (or even gravity as the article suggests) and get a huge nuclear bang.

Hard to see how anyone would come across such large amounts of enriched Uranium etc. tho.

[zeitghost]

Complete and utter b’locks. A reaction can only take place if compression is from all direction, hence why timing is the key to making a bomb. Korea is currently only get 10% of the yield because it can bot get the timing right.

Wrong!

With enriched uranium, you can achieve fission just by using a gun device.

I suspect that dropping the 2nd lump from 6 feet probably does not qualify for this definition (coz it's likely to fizzle because the lump is not travelling fast enough).

And this remarkable object achieves criticality with 54kg of 93.7% HEU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godiva...e-scrammed.jpg

Without generating 10kT.