Hydrogen bomb vs fission bomb free#

This is when the electrons orbiting the nuclei is stripped away from the nucleus and the nuclei and electrons are floating around freely in a kind of high temperature soup.Īt this temperature, the nuclei can get very close to each other – and when they get as close as 1X10^-15 meters apart, then the strong nuclear strong force which is present only at very close distances and is responsible for keeping protons and neutrons glued together, takes over and binds the protons and neutrons together to form a helium nucleus and a free neutron. (Center of sun is 15 million degrees) At this temperature, the isotopes become a form of matter called plasma. The temperatures needed are astronomical – higher than even that at the center of the sun – 100 million degrees celcius. But an extraordinary increase in speed of the atoms is needed in order to give them a chance to overcome their natural repulsion. This is why scientists chose hydrogen as the best candidate for fusion because it has only one proton, and thus would have less electrical charge than atoms with multiple protons in their nuclei.īut if the nuclei repel each other, how do they fuse? It turns out that if you increase the temperature by millions of degrees, it is possible to combine nuclei together.Īs the temperature increases, the atoms speed up. Ordinarily the nuclei of two atoms cannot be combined because these nuclei have strong positive electrical charges and repel each other. So this is what most hydrogen bombs today use as their fuel today.īut how does the process of fusion actually occur? The result was a dry, solid, stable powder called Lithium-deuteride. Scientists found that they could generate this on-the-spot inside the hydrogen bomb with a compound combining lithium and deuterium. One of the main problems with creating the Hydrogen bomb was obtaining the tritium. Unlike a natural hydrogen atom that is made of one electron orbiting around a proton, these isotopes have extra neutrons in their nuclei.Ī large amount of energy is released when these two isotopes fuse together to form helium because a helium atom has much less energy than these two isotopes combined. The fusion portion of the bomb creates energy by combining two isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and Tritium to create helium. It is the same process that powers our sun.Īnd when fission is combined with fusion in a hydrogen bomb, it creates energy orders of magnitude higher than fission alone, making hydrogen bombs 100’s to 1000’s of times more powerful than atomic bombs. a hydrogen bomb does something that releases even more energy, and that is it fuses atoms together.įusion is even more powerful than fission. While the atomic bomb like the one that was dropped on Hirsoshima worked on the principle of releasing energy through the splitting of atoms – also called fission, See my video on that. The first hydrogen bomb released the energy equivalent of 10,000,000 tons of TNT. The bomb on Hiroshima released the energy equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. What makes these weapons so powerful? How do they actually work? The world now has over 10,000 such bombs, capable of easily destroying every single person on our planet, many times over.

If a hydrogen bomb was dropped there, heaven forbid, it would not just destroy everything in a one mile radius, It would make into rubble everything in an 8 mile in radius. To give you an idea of its power, if the original Hiroshima bomb was dropped in New York City, heaven forbid, it would destroy everything in a 1 mile radius. Today, we have thermonuclear weapons, also called the hydrogen bomb. It unleashed energy and radiation that killed 140,000 people in the industrial city of Hiroshima Japan.Īs powerful as this bomb was, mankind has since invented a weapon that Is hundreds of times more powerful. It’s shock wave turned everything in a 1 mile radius to rubble. It was the most powerful weapon ever created by mankind. When it was unleashed on people in an effort to stop a war, all people saw was a blinding light, followed by complete darkness and destruction. How does a hydrogen bomb work? Mankind had never seen anything like it.