[HN Gopher] Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy...
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Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam
(2003)
Author : monort
Score : 88 points
Date : 2020-06-15 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| [deleted]
| emeraldd wrote:
| The concept reminds me a lot of device described in
| https://www.amazon.com/The-Genesis-Machine-James-P-Hogan-aud... I
| wonder if the authors have read it ...
| roywiggins wrote:
| Reads like something out of Vernor Vinge's Peace War.
| gojomo wrote:
| The invention of a "fission blanket" (aka "weak force
| intermodulation projector") that renders fission impossible, at
| a distance, is also part of the backstory for a scifi novel
| 'Emprise', by Michael P. Kube-McDowell.
| fnord77 wrote:
| Not sure triggering every nuclear bomb on the planet is a great
| outcome. I suppose if nations knew this was coming, they'd either
| dismantle their weapons or try to destroy the 1000km accelerator.
| [deleted]
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| I'd put my money on the latter. Perhaps with the former.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Both will destroy the nukes with similar collateral effects.
|
| Throwing them on the accelerator may even be the less
| damaging option.
| atemerev wrote:
| Sorry, this wouldn't work at all. I don't have time and desire to
| verify their neutrino beam / neutron shower calculation, but they
| want to detonate bombs by raising the core temperature to 300C,
| assumed ignition temperature of surrounding explosives.
|
| This doesn't work, because: 1) you cannot detonate explosives
| there by simple ignition, 2) you need a very precise timing for
| simultaneous activation of all detonators, to achieve the smooth
| shockwave front, and 3) even if all this somehow happened, you
| just can't explode the bomb just lying around AT ALL, as it is
| not in pre-critical configuration yet. There are many things that
| need to happen simultaneously, in exact order and with nanosecond
| precision. There are PAL devices that provide encrypted timing
| differences to the detonation controller by loading external
| codes -- without these codes, it is physically impossible to
| achieve nuclear explosion, even if you somehow activated all
| other things from pre-detonation checklist. Etc etc.
|
| Not to mention that in the real bomb, there is much less
| plutonium than 10 kg they have mentioned.
|
| I assume the rest of the paper is of similar quality.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| The paper seems to be talking about merely destroying bombs,
| rather than getting a nuclear yield.
| atemerev wrote:
| They assume 3% fizzle yield. It wouldn't work anyway (there
| will be exactly zero yield), the core will remain intact,
| ready for insertion into another physics package.
| maxander wrote:
| I don't know the details of how durable a uranium warhead
| core is (and I suspect it's very highly classified) but
| they're pretty precisely machined bits of metal. Even a
| 3%-yield fizzle should be more than enough to de-rate one.
| At that point the uranium could be recycled to build a new
| core, but that's about it.
| atemerev wrote:
| I know some details. (It is plutonium, not uranium). Any
| yield, even fizzle yield, is impossible by simply
| igniting the explosives around the core. Again, it is not
| in pre-critical configuration yet at this point. Arming
| the device, i.e. assembling the initial configuration, is
| an incredibly complicated and precise process. It is so
| beautiful from the engineering point of view.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| You don't seem to get it. The object of the exercise is
| not nuclear yield. BTW, you can physically damage fissile
| material that needs to be in a particular physical
| configuration with neutrons and/or x-rays. One is not
| trying to detonate the weapon, but rather render it in a
| state where it cannot reach the desired yield (preferably
| none at all, of course).
| yborg wrote:
| You are suggesting that just simple combustion of the HE
| lenses surrounding the core won't damage it at all? Even if
| the explosive just burns it would melt the physics package,
| there won't be any reinserting it anywhere. You could
| recover the fissile material I suppose.
| credit_guy wrote:
| It's not clear why they are aiming at exploding the nuclear bombs
| instead of simply degrading them. If you induce enough plutonium
| nuclei to split, the core won't reach criticality when the
| implosion happens, so no mushroom cloud.
|
| To do that, you can point a lower intensity neutrino beam for
| years at a nuke or a group of nukes. The adversary won't even
| know the nukes are compromised.
| tandr wrote:
| So it accelerates the decay of Pu or U-xxx inside the bomb. But
| this process is heat- and radiation-emitting, so I suspect if
| stockpile is monitored for either of these (probably both),
| something will be detected.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Is this similar to the idea that solar neutrinos might affect
| nuclear decay rates on earth? And if so, I thought this was very
| speculative still.
| [deleted]
| cowboysauce wrote:
| Not really, this is more akin to using a laser to destroy
| something at a distance. The neutrinos would interact with soil
| near the weapon, some of these reactions would produce neutrons
| which would go on to induce fission in the weapon, destroying
| it.
|
| The idea that solar neutrinos impact decay rates generally
| assumes that neutrinos are directly interacting with
| radioactive isotopes (usually through some unknown physics).
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It makes no sense to me that half-lives can't be affected by
| anything. Do you have a source for a discussion of this?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3754.pdf
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Star Trek needs this.
|
| "Mr Saru, destroy all the Klingon relay stations on the surface."
|
| "But Captain, some of them are on the other side of the planet."
|
| "Use the neutrino beam."
|
| "Aye Captain."
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| I used to work with a guy from LLNL who was involved with some
| of the X-Ray laser stuff and the like. There were some systems
| that, in theory, weren't that attenuated by the atmosphere...
|
| And that's where I learned the phrase: "Pre-Boost Phase" -- hit
| them in the silos. None of those systems appears to have borne
| fruit (or have they? oooo-eeeee [x-files music]).
| nordsieck wrote:
| In many ways, I'm glad this is so impractical. If it weren't, the
| prime candidate for actually doing this is one of the nuclear
| powers. They'd just "forget" to target their own nukes.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Not sure this would work for the nukes that are constantly moving
| around on submarines. Would have to know the exact position of
| the sub to aim the beam.
| tener wrote:
| It feels like it would be much easier to modify the nuclear
| weapons to be immune to this device than to actually build it.
|
| OTOH it may be easier to build than authors assume: what if it is
| build in orbit so it doesn't have shoot the beam across the
| Earth? I know we don't do accelerators in space, but it may be
| easier than reaching 1000 TeV.
| ufmace wrote:
| The idea is kind of cool, but doesn't sound very practical. The
| beam width is my concern. If it's really narrow, then we have to
| know exactly where every nuclear warhead is to hit it. If it's
| really wide, then the power draw will be that much more immense,
| plus a huge risk of collateral damage to any life, human or
| otherwise, that happens to get in the path of the beam.
|
| Not to mention that the prospect of detonating every nuke in the
| world, even at only 3% or so of normal yield, sounds pretty
| destructive too. If we're gonna get rid of some nukes, how about
| Megatons to Megawatts instead?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
| jessriedel wrote:
| > plus a huge risk of collateral damage to any life, human or
| otherwise, that happens to get in the path of the beam.
|
| Why? This doesn't actually deposit that much energy directly in
| any given volume. The beam is about a meter wide and the power
| is about a kilowatt (1000 joules per second). The authors say
|
| > This is equivalent to about 1 Sv/sec. We note that this value
| of the radiation dose is very large, compared with the U.S.
| Federal off-site limit of 1 mSv/year.
|
| but that seems wrong. Up to a dimensionless factor Q that
| adjusts for biological details, a sievert (Sv) is 1 joule of
| radiation energy deposited per kilogram. But that neutrino beam
| has a mean-free-path of the diameter of the Earth! That means
| it is roughly distributing the kilowatt of energy over 1 m^2 *
| 13,000 km ~= 1e7 m^3. At the density of water, that's 1e10 kg,
| so the deposited power is about a 1e-7 watts per kilogram, or
| roughly 100 nano sieverts per second. You'd have to point the
| beam at someone for 3 hours straight to exceed the
| (conservative) federal limit.
| function_seven wrote:
| My reading of the paper shows they already factored that into
| the equation. So at the target, in the 1m2 cross-section,
| 1,000 W of energy is being delivered. It takes about
| 50,000,000,000 W at the beam generator to achieve that.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| If it's just 50 gigawatts it is potentially viable,
| considering the stakes of nuclear warfare. The precise
| locations of most stationary nuclear weapons systems are
| already known, though this would run into some trouble
| finding nukes on submarines unless they were detected by
| submerged drones or subullites. I'd look into it.
| CSSer wrote:
| > most
|
| Sounds really perilous. If even one is missed isn't its
| risk of usage now astronomically higher?
| jessriedel wrote:
| Which part of the paper? I don't know why they would quote
| power per unit area for a beam that is clearly depositing
| it proportional to volume. What is the assumed depth?
| lend000 wrote:
| Furthermore, assuming it becomes feasible to develop multiple
| neutrino beam machines, you could use a technique similar to
| "Gamma Knife" to reduce the radiation exposure along the beam
| paths (and to make it harder to detect/track) [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosurgery#Gamma_Knife
| ufmace wrote:
| I don't know that much about the physics of neutrino
| radiation, or the fine details of bomb design. I do have a
| hard time believing that such a beam can dump enough neutron
| radiation into a subcritical bomb core to trigger a meltdown
| or fizzle detonation without also giving a dangerous exposure
| to any human who is in the way of that beam.
|
| I'm also suspicious of the difficult of aiming a beam that's
| a meter wide at the target distance to hit a nuclear warhead
| core reliably halfway across the world. If you miss, how do
| you tell what direction you missed in and correct?
| maxander wrote:
| I could imagine a wider "targeting" beam, fired so that a
| satellite overhead of the target site could catch neutrino
| scatter from the warhead. I don't know what ridiculous
| engineering would be required to get sufficient neutrino
| collection for that to work, on a satellite, but if the
| budget covered a 50GW neutrino beam it might stretch to
| that, too.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'd assume Selenites will want to have such a weapon pointed
| towards Earth in case Earthlings decide to act up.
|
| They'll have a lot of solar power to play with too.
|
| And it's much neater than throwing rocks too. And faster.
| lsllc wrote:
| At least the Trisolarians can use their sophons to prevent
| such a thing.
| caffed wrote:
| 2020: 1. Covid 2. Polic Brutality 3. Cicadas 4. Global Thermal
| Nuclear war
|
| Yep....
|
| Hey, it's only a "3% fizzle reaction". How bad can that be?
| redis_mlc wrote:
| The US sent 3 carriers towards Asia last week to deter China
| and other countries from thinking that the corona pandemic and
| US riots was a good time to escalate.
| e0m wrote:
| From the introduction of the Paper:
|
| "We emphasize that the whole technology is futuristic and the
| reason should be clear to all the accelerator experts... We also
| note that a 1000 TeV machine requires the accelerator
| circumference of the order of 1000 km with the magnets of [?] 10
| Tesla which is totally ridiculous... Even if it becomes the
| reality, the cost of the construction is of the order of or more
| than 100 billion US$... the power required for the operation of
| the machine may exceed 50 GW"
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| $100 billion for a high-tech structure of 1000km in size? I
| think you're severely underestimating.
| CalRobert wrote:
| The title alone should give you pause; neutrinos are no easy
| thing to wrangle. We build giant swimming pools of water
| underground in the dark to try to catch them.
|
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
|
| "We emphasize that the whole technology is futuristic and
| thereason should be clear toall the accelerator experts.
| Actually, even the simplest prototype of our proposal, i.e.
| theneutrino factory of GeV range needs substantial R & D work.
| Wealso note that a 1000 TeVmachine requires the accelerator
| circumference of the order of 1000 km with the magnetsof[?]10
| Tesla which is totally ridiculous. Only if we can invent a magnet
| which can reachalmost one order of magnitude higher field than
| the currentlyavailable magnet, the proposalcan approach the
| reality. Even if it becomes the reality, thecost of the
| construction is ofthe order of or more than 100 billion US$. Also
| we note that thepower required for theoperation of the machine
| may exceed 50 GW taking the efficiencyinto account. This is
| abovethe total power of Great Britain. This implies that no
| singlecountry will be able to affordthe construction of this
| machine and also the operation timemust be strictly restricted.
| Webelieve the only way this machine may be built is when all the
| countries on earth agree todo it by creating an organization
| which may be called the "World Government" for whichthis device
| becomes the means of enforcement."
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >This implies that no singlecountry will be able to affordthe
| construction of this machine and also the operation timemust be
| strictly restricted.
|
| Meh, $100 billion? The US has spent more than that on it's own
| defense initiative ($200 billion from the sources I found). [1]
| And as for the power usage, 1 of the two reactors on the new
| class of aircraft carriers would provide 125MW (or 700MW of
| thermal energy, granted I'm not a physicist, but the thermal
| power is probably what they're after here?) [2], so I don't
| think it'd be out of the realm of possibilities to either build
| more reactors for the project, or do a combination of hooking
| up to existing naval reactors and new reactors to run.
|
| If the Cold War was going on, I'd be shocked if this wasn't
| something the U.S military looked into doing. No one is
| thrilled with MAD approach, it's more of just no one has found
| a better way to deal with nuclear weapons.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor
| pugworthy wrote:
| It sounds staight out of Star Trek
| cshimmin wrote:
| Particle physicist here! Actually it's pretty easy to generate
| intense neutrino beams. You just have to accelerate protons and
| smash them into a lead wall. This produces all kinds of
| particles, including for instance muons. Since muons are
| charged, you can filter and focus them into a beam using
| magnets, and then they rapidly decay in flight, producing a
| beam of neutrinos going in the same direction.
|
| As you say, they are quite difficult to detect once produced.
| This is exactly what the DUNE experiment will be doing. It's a
| large underground detector in North Dakota that will measure
| properties of neutrinos produced in a beam at Fermilab near
| Chicago.
|
| The difficulties mentioned in the quote from the article have
| little to do with neutrinos. 1000 TeV is simply an insanely
| high energy for any particle beam.
| protomyth wrote:
| Sanford Underground Research Laboratory is in Lead, _South_
| Dakota.
| cshimmin wrote:
| D'oh you are correct. I'm always getting my Dakotas mixed
| up. I should have also added that this is not my specialty
| (I work on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in Switzerland).
| protomyth wrote:
| Happens all the time, the NY Times confuse which state
| has what Senator and ESPN's stock footage for "North
| Dakota" is a bison with the I90 Highway sign in the
| background (I90 is SD, I94 is ND).
| gpderetta wrote:
| > Lead
|
| I guess it is not a coincidence they are putting a neutrino
| detector in a place called that way.
|
| Am I correct to assume there are old lead mines there?
|
| Edit: there are mines, very deep mines, but not Lead mines
| in fact. And the detector is in one of them.
| zedpm wrote:
| Lead is not named for the element lead nor is it
| pronounced the same. It's pronounced like leader (without
| the er, of course) and named for a mining term[0].
|
| [0]: https://www.britannica.com/place/Lead-South-Dakota
| Animats wrote:
| Can you modulate and detect the beam fast enough for this to
| be useful for transmitting low-latency info for high-
| frequency trading? That could pay for the experiment if you
| had a detector near NYC.
| cshimmin wrote:
| Fascinating idea. The neutrinos travel at effectively the
| speed of light and can be sent directly through the earth,
| providing a minimum-distance "line of sight" between any
| two points on earth. However, the same property that allows
| the neutrinos to pass through the earth is also the reason
| they're so hard to detect. You would probably only be able
| to be able to detect modulation frequencies on the order of
| weeks or months. The bandwidth would be very low to say the
| least!
| lostmyoldone wrote:
| There are research where they've done short haul (~1km i
| think) neutrino comms at about 0.1bit/s.
|
| Slow but still cool, and yes if you could get high enough
| bitrate for less money than you could gain in HFT trade,
| it would probably already exist. Them HFT guys and girls
| do rather crazy stuff to get their nanosecond advantages.
| aaronax wrote:
| Actually the detector will be in Lead, South Dakota (in the
| Black Hills, somewhat near Mt. Rushmore) according to their
| website.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Thank you for that! I just learned something.
| deftnerd wrote:
| > Actually it's pretty easy to generate intense neutrino
| beams. You just have to accelerate protons and smash them
| into a lead wall. This produces all kinds of particles,
| including for instance muons. Since muons are charged, you
| can filter and focus them into a beam using magnets, and then
| they rapidly decay in flight, producing a beam of neutrinos
| going in the same direction.
|
| That's pretty fascinating. When the protons hit the lead
| wall, are there any other "messy" particles created that are
| problematic? Filtering and focusing the muons might be
| relatively easy to handle, but what about the other kinds of
| particles that will be created?
| jjk166 wrote:
| By selecting the energy of the proton beam correctly, you
| can prevent much besides the muons from being produced.
| Whatever other particles do show up - if not guided by
| carefully set up electromagnetic fields - will quickly
| smash into the walls of the device, generating heat as they
| scatter and decay. Some of this heat can be used to boil a
| coolant and regenerate energy, but for the most part it is
| just an inefficiency. The lead wall and some of the
| material around it will become radioactive waste as some
| long lived isotopes are produced, but they could
| potentially have many years of service life.
| mandevil wrote:
| Fortunately, Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger won the 1988
| Nobel Prize in Physics for figuring out how to build a neutrino
| beam, which is much easier than detecting them. Basically, slam
| a proton beam into a few feet of something big and heavy. The
| big heavy stuff will absorb everything else, and leave just a
| beam of neutrinos, which don't care if you have miles of armor
| rather than feet.
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