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RE: Tritium in old nuclear weapons





The following link may help clear things up. Click on the link and enter
"Hydrogen Bomb" in the search field.

http://rabi.phys.virginia.edu/HTW/

The relevant excerpt (by a physics professor at UVA) is:

How does a hydrogen bomb work? How does it differ from the atomic bomb besides
the simple difference of fusion and fission? -- KS, Lake Oswego, OR

A hydrogen bomb uses the heat from a fission bomb (a uranium or plutonium bomb,
sometimes called an atomic bomb) to cause hydrogen nuclei to collide and fuse,
thereby releasing enormous amounts of energy. While a fission bomb can initiate
its nuclear reactions at room temperature, fusion reactions won't begin until
the nuclei involved have been heated to enormous temperatures. That's because
the nuclei are all positively charged and repel one another strongly up until
the moment they stick. Only at enormous temperatures (typically hundreds of
millions of degrees) will the nuclei collide hard enough to stick and release
their nuclear energy. A typical hydrogen bomb (also called a fusion bomb or
thermonuclear bomb) uses a fission trigger to initiate fusion in a mixture of
deuterium and tritium, the heavy isotopes of hydrogen. These neutron-rich
isotopes fuse much more easily than normal hydrogen. Because deuterium and
tritium are both gases, and because tritium is unstable and gradually decays
into the light is
otope of helium, some hydrogen bombs form the tritium during the explosion by
exposing lithium nuclei to neutrons from the fission trigger. Thus the "fuel"
for many thermonuclear bombs is actually lithium deuteride, which becomes a
mixture of tritium and deuterium during the explosion and then becomes various
helium nuclei through fusion.


Ernesto Faillace (Italian citizen with absolutely no security clearance
whatsoever to access any classified information...)
efaillace@earthlink.net





dpharrison@aep.com on 02/23/2000 06:50:31 AM

Please respond to radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu

To:   Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
cc:    (bcc: Ernesto Faillace/YM/RWDOE)

Subject:  RE: Tritium in old nuclear weapons






Careful not to get into classified space here.  Have a authorized derivative
classifier review your emails/correspondences to ensure unclassified status.




Perron Harvard C PSNS <perronh@psns.navy.mil> on 02/23/2000 09:34:06 AM

Please respond to radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu

To:   Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
cc:    (bcc: David P Harrison/BC2/AEPIN)

Subject:  RE: Tritium in old nuclear weapons




I was under the impression that the tritium supplied the fuel for the fusion
reaction which boosted the overall yield of the weapon and the fission
reaction provided the conditions (heat and pressure) necessary to initiate
the fusion reaction.

H. Perron
Health Physicist
perronh@psns.navy.mil

-----Original Message-----
From: rick.haynes@srs.gov [mailto:rick.haynes@srs.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2000 3:58 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Tritium in old nuclear weapons



Sorry about the last e-mail.  That was actually my first response to a
radsafe e-mail.  I attached it to a summary, apparently that doesn't work.
Anyway, someone asked about the tritium in old nuclear weapons.

Tritium gas has a "limited life" in the weapon due to its decay to He-3.
Because of this, the tritium bottle in the weapon is changed out on a
periodic basis.  The tritium bottle is removed from the weapon, replaced
with a "fresh" bottle, and the old bottle is returned to the Savannah River
Site (SRS) near Aiken, SC, where the tritium is recovered to be reused.
When the weapon is retired, the tritium bottle is removed and returned to
the SRS where the tritium/He-3 mixture is removed from the bottle, and the
tritium is again recovered and reused.  The half-life of tritium is around
12-yrs.  The tritium is used "boost" the yield of the weapon by providing
more neutrons which allows more fissions to take place in the primary
system.

Rick


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