Nuclear Explosion, 4 questions?

1.How does a nuclear explosion look like?

2.Why does is look like that?

3.What are the effects?

4.Why does a nuclear explosion happen?

and dont tell me because a bomb explodes!

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

1 &2. Any explosion is just a rapidly expanding ball of heat, light, and other forms of energy. In the case of a nuclear explosion, it is just exceptionally hot and bright. When one takes place in our atmosphere, the air that is superheated by the explosion rapidly expands outward, and the air displaced by the rapidly expanding air forms a shockwave. The fireball also rises, because hot air always rises. When one occurs on the ground, the huge mass of superheated air, dirt and other debris rises into the air while it expands, forming a "mushroom cloud".

3. Closest to the site of the explosion, everything is bathed in massive amounts of deadly alpha, beta, gamma & x-ray radiation, not to mention millions of degrees of heat. Further out, objects are still destroyed, burned, knocked down, etc. by the blast of the shockwave. Further out still, electrical appliances are shorted out or ruined by the EMP (electomagnetic pulse) caused by massive amounts of radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation. The same way that you can go temporarily or permanently blind by seeing an extremely bright light, radios, televisions and other devices that pick up these kinds of waves an be similarly damaged. Finally, particle radiation (alpha- and beta-rays) induces radioactivity in other matter, so all the dirt spread by the explosion and swept up into the mushroom cloud will spread as far as the wind will take it, a dust called radioactive fallout.

4. There are two types of nuclear reaction: fission and fusion. The first bombs tested and used in WWII were fission bombs (first called atomis bombs). They involved rapidly cramming together a mass of uranium, a heavy, radioactive substance, to the point where the internal radiation was so great that it caused the uranium atoms to begin breaking apart. This in turn causes more radiation, breaking apart more atoms, in a chain reaction until the uranium is all destryed, and massive amounts of energy is unleased.

Fusion bombs are exactly the opposite. Instead of getting energy by breaking an atom apart, fusion is the "fusing" of two hydrogen atoms into helium, which releases even more energy, without quite as much of the nasty particle radiation. It takes a tremendous amount of heat and pressure to accomplish this, however, so hydrogen bombs (or H-bombs) have a fission "trigger" using plutonium, which acts in the same way uranium does

Garrett

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