Gamma-ray weapons could trigger next arms race

From New Scientist Online News ^ | 19:00 13 August 03 | By David Hambling

[DBrow]

Making enough low-energy x-rays to flood even a gram of Hf is not really that easy. You would not use a dentist's machine!

http://members.aol.com/puhls/afwl.html

http://www.sandia.gov/pulspowr/facilities/saturn.html

[Lael]

Very interesting.

Hafnium, chemically very similar to Zirconium, has a very interesting set of Nuclear Properties.

In the design and fabrication of very small Nuclear Reactors, Uranium of virtually Bomb Grade [approx 90% U235] is loaded into a reactor made of Zirconium, which is transparent to Neutrons.

Control rods, which must be Opaque to Neutrons, are preferably fabricated from Hafnium.

The result is an extremely small reactor, allowing two or more to be carried on a Nuclear Submarine, even relatively small research Subs.

I have wondered, since studing Engineering at the College which housed 3 reactors [one critical, two subcritical] in New York City, whether Hafnium's efficiency as a control material might involve this kind of State Change, i.e. some form of Energy Pumping.

Hafnium, named for the Roman name for Copenhagen, Denmark, was discovered in Zirconium ores in the 1920's, and its discovery was announced by Niels Bohr in Stockholm in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

[manic4organic]

Think of how big a boom it'll be if they use fullnium instead of hafnium!

[kAcknor]

 this technology could trigger the next arms race

kAcknor Sez:

Next arms race?

Crap.

Ever since the day Oog learned to throw a rock and Moog picked up a broken branch and smacked him for it we have had an "Arms Race".

We will continue to have one as long as there are still two people left.

"bISovbejbe'DI' tImer" (When in doubt, surprise them.)

Have you checked the *bang_list today?
Get your daily dose of Newslinks!

[Mackey]

Think of how big a boom it'll be if they use fullnium instead of hafnium!

Fullnium??? Where did you go to school? At dear old Whassamatta U it was referred to as Wholenium!

just wait until they discover Dubyanium...

[Constantine XIII]

grazer bump!

[Constantine XIII]

It's similar to unobtainium, but shinier. :)

[Mackey]

As it happens, the plant where I work produces zirconium, about 2 million pounds of nuclear grade metal per year. Since hafnium is always present in Zr ores, and must be removed, we also have a fair chunk of that lying around too... there hasn't been much of a market for Hf, so it just accumulates.

[wretchard]

That's about right 2.2 pounds to a kilogram, a shade under 500 grams to a pound.

[SauronOfMordor]

But what's the strategic difference? Aren't they both weapons that kill everything in a vicinity? As such, each has drawbacks.

It looks like there's no lower limit to how small you can make a hafnium device. This becomes significant in the age of nanotech and small robots. Visualize a bumblebee-size robot flying in an enemy leader's window and blowing up the room

[SauronOfMordor]

Making enough low-energy x-rays to flood even a gram of Hf is not really that easy. You would not use a dentist's machine!

More compact machines will be developed over time. And the two pieces do not necessarily have to be in the same place. Visualize a bomb that disperses a cloud of hafnium on top of a target, which is then illuminated by an x-ray laser from the bomber.

[DBrow]

Yup, then all we'd need is an x-ray laser of the correct wavelength. We don't have one now, and there won't be one for the foreseeable future due to physics constraints.

Lawrence Livermore Labs got accused of fraud when they said they could biuld one, pumped with a fission bomb. The point was, the fission bomb would produce thousands of times more damage than the laser, so why not just drop the bomb and be done with it?

[Bon mots]

PICTURES!!! You know the rules. Pictures of the goods!!
Anyway, here's the W-54 Davy Crockett atomic bazooka:


This is 1954 technology and we produced a couple of thousand of them. They were decommissioned. A couple of these babies would get Osama out of his cave...

[maro]

That assumes we know which window.