How Does a Nuclear Bomb Work?

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Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, do you ever wish you had a superpower all the time? I wish I had lots of superpowers. But you know, science has actually provided us with some real, honest to God powers that our ancestors might have thought were superpowers. Not quite yet, but you know, we can do some pretty amazing stuff. We'll listen to the podcast episode about teleportation before you decide, but we can do some pretty amazing stuff, stuff that would have limited to deities a thousand years ago. You know, things like harnessing the power of the sun. What do you mean, like we can create the sun here on Earth. Yeah, absolutely, we can create miniute your son's here on Earth. Not recommended to do in your at home kitchen, but it's something science is capable of. Hi. I'm Jorge and I'm Daniel. Welcome to Daniel and Jorge explained the Universe our podcast about the universe and everything in it and everyone in it, and even about aliens if they are in it. Yea, even about sons sons s U N and sons s O N, And we explain it all today on the program. We are actually talking about harnessing the power of the sun. Science has distilled the thing that happens inside the sun, the energy release, and made it available for us here on Earth with explosive results. That's right. So, if you are a dictator of your own little country looking to become a nuclear superpower, this is the podcast for you. Do they ever going to talk about nuclear weapons and specifically the nuclear bomb? How does it work? How do you build one in your garage? Should you build one in your garage? The answer is no, The answer is definitely no, one should you? But could you? Maybe? Maybe this podcast is about the science, not the ethics. I think we'll touch on both actually, because science is never free of ethics. It's it's always a complex mixture. So nuclear bombs is something that people, obviously we're very surprised to learn about in the mid forties, uh, and then there was a huge concern with the Cold War up until the eighties and nineties, but then it sort of quieted down until a little bit recently. Right, there's been a lot of talk about rogue nations and the threat of nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Well, if you ask the Union of Concerned Scientists, I don't think they've quieted down at all. There's been a pretty consistent fear that we would destroy ourselves and kill everybody on basically since we've got the power to do so. Yeah, I mean we had in the eighties, the USSR in the USA had enormous nuclear stockpiles, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other with hair triggers. And these days we have fewer, you know, if in the number of thousands instead of tens of thousands, But still there's plenty of power there to destroy each other very easy. Only are you saying scientists have a hard time relaxing in general, if you know, the more you know about the state of nuclear weapons, the harder it is to really relax. Yes, but you know your your point is taken. The big powers have not yet blown each other up, and we are worth these days about smaller powers and nuclear powers and terrorists in North Korea and all these folks who were developing these capabilities. So it kind of made us wonder, like, how many people out there actually know how a nuclear bomb works? And how do you make one? And would it be a bad idea to explain to everybody exactly how to build a nuclear bomb? Yeah? Are we going to get arrested for this podcast or put on some kind of watch list surveillance. That's right. And to say we are not telling you everybody anything that wouldn't know in a physics class anyway. Yes, if we are going to get arrested for treason, you gotta lock up every professor out there, Yes, which I bet some people would like to do. That's right. That was not a policy suggestion. H m hmmm. So we went out there and ask people, do you know how a nuclear bomb works? Yeah? So I think for a moment, how much do you know about a nuclear weapon? How does it actually work? If you had to? Could you build one in your garage? Here's what people had to say. I'm not sure. Honestly, I do not have no idea at all. Um, by smashing together particles cool? I'd only say yes, but I don't know how to say it in the English Chinese? Uh honevia. So there's a two kinds of nuclear bomb, right? Yeah? I combon and what was that called hydridable? Yeah? So it's why is vision? Yeah? Wha yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah So that's interesting. I feel like not a lot of people know how nuclear bomb works. Yeah. Half the people had no idea um, and the other half had some idea that it was something about the power of the atom. I like, the guy who only knew the words in Chinese, keep is so excited to tell me what he knew. I was like, yeah, tell me Chinese, that's fine. He definitely knew something about the topic. But yeah, people generally either didn't know anything or they knew that it's something to do with the adamant and they're right. Essentially, the way nuclear bomb works is that it releases energy stored inside the atom or lots of atoms, really really rapidly. M m. That's what's called the atomic bomb. Yeah. The early versions are called atomic bombs. So there's sort of two categories of nuclear weapons. There's the early ones that use fission where you split an atom apart. Those are called atomic bombs, and the later ones that are called hydrogen bombs or h bombs. Those use fusion where you squeeze nucleon together. And we'll get into the nitty gritty of exactly all how that works and why it's interesting. So there are atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs. They're both nuclear weapons. Oh, I see, and they weren't using different methods one of them is fizzy, the other one is fuzzy. That's exactly right, that's exactly right. One of them split the atom opened, and the other one squeezes atom together. And it's sort of surprising. You might be thinking. Hold on, if splitting atoms open releases energy, how come the opposite thing of fusing them together also releases energy. Yeah. Well, before we get into the technical details, you mentioned you had some personal connection to the Manhattan Project and the nuclear industry here in the United States. Can you tell us about that. Yeah, it's not that I've ever built a nuclear bomb myself. No, certainly not about doctor Manhattan. I'm not Doctor Manhattan. But I did grow up in Los Angles, New Mexico, the home of the Manhattan Project, where in the forties all these scientists got together to crack this mystery. And you know, the history of this is fascinating. It was in the late thirties that people figured out, oh, you can split the atom and release some huge amounts of energy. I mean, much more energy than is released when you blow up dynamite or burnt coal or anything like that. And so immediately, even before the world was at war, people realized this is the technology for a new weapon. This could be a devastating new super happened, and so of course most people know the story. The US government gathered people together in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. They chose Los Almos because it's a place basically no one would go on purpose, and so no one would run into it. It wasn't because if they made a mistake, not that many people would would die in an active uh you know what. That's probably an aspect of it also being remote out in the middle of the desert um. But as a high schooler, you know, it wasn't much consolation to know that you were living in a place that that the government thought was going to be super boring and no one would want to go to. And they were pretty much right. There's not a whole lot to do in Los Almos. And in fact, your parents worked for the Los Almos National Laboratory, right They worked on nuclear engineering and physics. That's right. Both of my parents worked for Los Almos labs where the bombs were developed. What they work on, I can't tell you, not because I'm being secretive about it, but because I don't know. Both of them had Q clearances, they never told you. No, I never visited their offices. I never talked to them in any detail about their work. I never heard about it because it was all behind the clearance fence, the security fence. It was all top secret. Wow, they saw you as a threat even then, that's right. They have to go through a laborate procedures to make sure they were trustworthy. We're not going to be spies for some enemy nation or something like that, or blackmail bull So like at the dinner table, what would you guys talk about, Like how is work? I can't tell you, don't ask me. We learned pretty quickly not to ask those questions exactly. And there was no you know, take your son to work day or this kind of stuff. And you know, it's interesting because when I was a kid, I learned about the history of Los Alamos. And in Los Almos, they teach you pride. They teach you this is the place the bomb was developed. This is the location of a great scientific discovery, and not just that, but that we should feel pride, national pride, and having developed something which won the war. Right, people in this town, scientists and where your parents work, they won the war with their brains and so this sort of like pride was really deeply um not moving into the curriculum in life in Los Almos. It's almost like propaganda. Definitely, it's exactly like propaganda, because it is propaganda. And it was only later that I heard about the controversy, like should we have dropped those bombs and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians? You know, that turns out to be quite a complex moral question, you know. And if you're a scientist working on these weapons, should you be should you be developing these weapons and then putting them in the hands of politicians who could use them to kill women and children? Did you ever talk to your that about that, like if he ever felt any feelings like that or how an your thoughts about that? You know. It's interesting is I didn't ask him about it until I was in my twenties, you know, like a decade after we lived in Los Alamos, and I asked him about and he said, you're the first person to ask me that question, and that was sort of shocking. Also, like people most almost don't discuss it very much. His friends didn't ask him, his family is what the family didn't ask him. I was a physics student. I knew all about this and and never asked him until it's finally occurred to me. And yeah, so I asked him, and he, um, you know, he's thought about it, he's balanced these things, and he thought, um, that the nation needed defending, and there are other people out there developing nuclear weapons, and that we needed to have our arsenal ready and needed to be a tip top shape, and we needed to have the same guns as the enemy had. And you know, this was in the eighties and nineties, and so the Cold War was a very recent memory, and it was not ridiculous to think that the Russia could launch nuclear weapons against us. So I think he felt some sort of pride that he was helping the national cause. So like, what was your high school mascot in your school radiation? That the fallout? Right, probably the radioactive isotope. No, No, it was nothing so exciting. We lived in the top of a hill. It was almost the top of mountains. So are high school mascot is the hilltoppers? Yeah, not not terribly exciting. Um, But my reaction to this, this moral quandity, was totally different. I didn't want to have anything to do with it, and so want. I had to choose a field of physics to study, I chose something very far away from any practical applications, which is, you know, Higgs boson and dark matter and particle physics. And so it's a selling point to me that none of my research could ever have any practical, immediate practical application and therefore probably not be used to kill any babies. And you know that helps me sleep at night, not killing babies for my work, just avoid all responsibility. Yeah, you almost could say I'm a cartoonist, right have have any of your cartoons ever killed any babies? Not that I know of. Maybe you should look into that, wholegs and you should have a more definitive answer to that question. I feel like this is a great recruiting of audio for physicists, you know, looking to avoid responsibility, don't want anything to do with the real world, like the particles, don't like killing babies. Go into particle physics. We have killed zero babies to date. So you're you're tied to sort of the history of nuclear energy in this country. Yeah, absolutely, And you know, my parents were supported by the Department of Energy, and now actually the Department Energy supports my research. So I've basically been supported by the Department of Energy directly or indirectly since I was ten um, so I'm pretty totally closely tied into what I can say. I'm completely morally insulated from it. I mean, I ate food which was paid for by the programs which funded nuclear weapons development, etcetera, etcetera. So my hands are not clean. Yeah, so I feel this personal connection, and I used to feel this pride, and now I feel, you know, a lot shame. But it's definitely more complicated, definitely not happy. When I imagine all those people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, I'm going about their day and then being suddenly destroyed by nuclear bombs. It's definitely complicated how these bombs work. But before we get into it, let's take a quick break. All right, let's talk about how exactly a nuclear bomb works. So how you said there's two kinds. Actually there is fusion and there is fission bombs, So that's two different kinds of nuclear bombs. How do they work? That's right? And so if you are the director of a rogue nation's nuclear weapons program, this is where you're gonna want to start taking notes. Okay, So I like how do you choose which one. It's fascinating because a fusion bomb actually requires a fission bomb to ignite it. Yeah, but we'll talk about that in a minute. So you should start with if you're developing a new technology, you start with fission because it's easier. All the fusion is much more powerful. So fission is breaking the nucleus of an atom, and fusion is putting together the nucleus of an atom. That's the difference, right, That's right. Fusion is fusing together and a nucleus, and fission is breaking it apart, exactly, fizzing it or phisiling it or physicisting it or whatever the verb is fizzing. Okay, thank you, and um so. But a nuclear bomb works essentially the same way as another bomb, and that its goal is released a lot of energy. Right, So you have to find some stored and ergen and release it. And you can do that in dynamite with this stored chemical energy, or something in oil with this stored stored energy in the gasoline or whatever. But nuclear energy is much more powerful because it has a lot more energy stored in it. Because that's all a bomb is, It's just the release of a lot of energy at the same time in a small space, right, Exactly, anything you use for power you can also turn into a bomb. Just release that energy really really quickly. Right. You can slowly burn the gasoline in your car, or you can put it in a vocal bottle and set it on fire like a Molotov cocktail. It's the same process. It just happens more rapidly. And if you release all that energy really quickly, then it creates a shock wave, right, And that's what's destructive, is creating all this energy release at once creates this shock wave of heat and air, and that's what blasts things apart. I see. So, like the batteries in my phone have a lot of energy stored in it into it, but there's no reaction that will cause it to like be released all quickly at the same time, exactly unless you have the Galaxy notes seven with Jack. If you have it, please at least take it back in right. But as far as I'm aware, there's no nuclear bomb app that which will set your phone on fire or anything. So where does that energy come from? And so our interviewees were correct, and that energy comes from the atom itself. That is, if you take uranium, for example, and you split it in half, energy is released. And so that that's the basic idea. You might wonder all wise, energy released, right, Well, so uranium breaks into two other things, krypton and barium, and so those two things are released. And the reason energy is released is because there's more energy stored in uranium than in the sum of krypton and barium, and so when you break it into crypton embarium, there's extra energy left over. But it's it's kind of weird to grasp because if I take a stick of wood and I split it in half, I don't get energy released, that's right. But imagine you had a stick of wood that was in two pieces and it was held together by a spring, right, Then there's stored energy g in that configuration, and when you break it, that's released. The sprain will sprung out. Yeah, it'll spring out and will push the two things apart. For example. So if there's stored energy in the configuration and you break it, then that energy is released. And so that's what happens when you break uranium atom. There's energy stored in the arrangement, right, and then energy is released, meaning and it that's what it does it that energy that's stored then pushes the two pieces apart really fast. Yeah, and it actually sends out neutrons. You get you get two other smaller atoms and a bunch of neutrons which fly out. Okay, and the neutrons were actually part of the original nucleus. Yeah, exactly, part of the uranium nucleus. You got to start with something which can break into two smaller pieces and release energy. That's the goal if you want to do fission, and uranium is great for that. There are other things that can do it also, plutonium, amersium, other ones, but uranium is the one which works best. Okay, why why is it good for? Why is uranium good? What's special about uranium? Well, it just so happens that is an isotope of uranium, uranium two thirty five, which is really unstable, and so it's easier to get it too. I'm looking for that verb again. Fizz fizz ile vision eight split, vision eight split. Thank you. It's easier to get uranium two thirty five to split than uranium two thirty eight or whatever. Each is, like it's across breaking apart itself, so it's easy to make it split up exactly, it's less stable exactly, right. Yeah, and so that's fission. That's why you always hear uranium and uranium cakes and uranium enrichment. Exactly, uranium enrichment because the kind of uranium that you normally find in the ground a uranium mine is not uranium two thirty five is not the kind we want for nuclear weapons. That kind is pretty rare. It's you know, one in I don't know the number, but one in a zillion atoms of uranium that you find in the ground is the kind of unique for nuclear weapons, which is why one of the big obstacles to making a nuclear weapon is not knowing how to do it, because this physics is pretty widely known. But hitting the fuel these that's why, for example, Iran was working on centrifuges, because they're trying to separate out the different isotopes uranium to get the one that's good for the bomb. I believe the numbers zero point Daniel. Wow, it's like your Siri or Wikipedia or something. Okay, So, yeah, so uranium is about to split and has a lot of energy. That's why they use it for fission bombs. That's right. But there's another key element, which is you can't just release the energy of one atom. I mean, you can do that, but it's not very it's not going to be a very good bomb, right. And what you need is, as we said, is to release a lot of energy all at once, and for that you need not just one atom to go, but a lot of atoms to go. So for that to happen, you need to create a chain reaction. So meaning you take a lot of this enriched uranium, so uranium that has a lot of this U to thirty five, and you put it onto this one spot and then you cause a chain reaction. That's the idea of a bomb, right, yeah, exactly. And so the neutrons that fly out and carry some of this leftover energy then bump into other uranium two five atoms which then phizzle, physicate, physicate, thank you, and um. And then it goes on and on and on, and you get more neutrons and more neutrons, and pretty soon you have a huge number of neutrons flying out, which create which causes a huge amount of atoms to split all at the same time, and that's your explosion right there. In order that to happen, you. You need to have enough fuel and it needs to be dense enough so the neutrons bump into the other atoms. So that's called the critical mass. When you have enough fuel and a dense enough location, And that's really all you need to do to start the bomb off. Like a rumor or like a panic and a crowd. You need enough people jamp together to really cause a big panic. Yeah, exactly. For your analogy, you need something to trigger the other thing. It's like that seen in Stand By Me. You know, where they're vomiting vomits. Smell causes to other people to vomit, which costs four of the people to vomit, and pretty soon everybody, ah yeah that movie. Yeah, but if if people were not close together, then you wouldn't this reaction wouldn't catch fire, right Like, it wouldn't catch on. So you need you need a lot of people together, a lot of these atoms together to cause this chain reaction. Exactly. And all you need to do to create a nuclear weapon. People might be wondering, how do you start it to like have a pile of uranium and you like light a match or put a lighter on it or something. All you need to do is have enough fuel all put together, and one of the atoms inside it will be unstable enough to just fall apart on its own and that will trigger the chain reaction, which it leads to the explosion. And so the way the nuclear bomb actually works is you basically have two subcritical masses, like a chunk uranium here and a chunk uranium there, and you just slam them together and uh, and then it goes off. And that's it. So um, for those of you out there looking to build a nuclear weapon, all you need to do is get enough uranium two thirty five and arrange it in two pieces to slam together in the right concentration, in the right concentration the right purity. Yeah, okay. And some of the original designs that were like, well, let's make one of the pieces sort of like a cup and the other piece sort of like a ball, and we'll just like drop the ball in the cup. Um, and and that worked really, So just bringing these two things together will suddenly cause the reaction to start. Yeah, exactly, that's all you need to do. So separately, what happens. Why don't they start separately, Well, they do start separately. They just don't take off, So you have atoms in their decaying all the time, but they don't start the chain reaction because it's not density, just doesn't catch fire. Yeah, you need to You need essentially to have these two pieces and have them be dense enough to squeeze them a little bit. And so what they actually they don't call it a ball in a cup. They call it a gun assembly because they basically shoot one piece of uranium into another and that creates this density. You need to have the chain reaction. So that's a fission bombs, that's it's splitting. That's the one that splits atoms. There's also one that fuses atoms. Yeah, and it's fascinating to me. It's a totally different process um and that sticking atoms together can also release energy the same way splitting an atom can, Right, that's really counterintuitive. Yeah, but the way it works is you take two pieces of hydrogen, so the lightest element there is, and you stick them together and you get helium. And you don't just get helium, you get extra energy left over. So where did this energy come from? The energy comes from the configuration of the helium atom versus the configuration of the hydrogen atom. What is helium. It's basically just two hydrogen atom stuck together, right, and so you've got those protons, you got those neutrons all mixed together. It takes more energy to break helium apart than it does to break hydrogen atom apart, and so when you put the helium together, that energy has to get released somewhere. It's like you've put two hydrogen atoms into a hole, right, and that you would need to use energy to take them out again. So when you put them in that hole, some energy is released. It's like you drop them in the hole and they turn a lever which generates some electricity or something. It's kind of like if you're single, you have to pay a certa amount of taxes, but if you get married, then you have to pay maybe a little bit less of taxes. Right, yeah, exactly right, exactly right. But that kind of marital fusion doesn't usually cause um weapons of mass destruction though. Yeah, but it's kind of the same idea. It's like, separately, um, you have a you make a certain amount of money, but together, because you're the configuration together, you have extra money left over. Yeah, and it all depends on the configuration of the atoms inside. And so it just so happens that helium takes more energy to break apart than hydrogen does. And so when you build helium out of hydrogen, energy is released. Then you could take that energy and put it back in to break the helum apart and get your hydrogen back. So it makes more sense if you think about it the other direction. Take helium, you need to put energy and to break it into hydrogen. I see, it's not like uranium, where if you break it it releases energy. This time it causts you energy to break helium apart. That's right. Imagine you know, for example, you have two magnets and they're stuck together, right. Obviously it takes energy to pull the two magnets apart, right, So that means that when you when the two magnets stick together, energy is released. And that's exactly what happens. So I said that some atoms cost energy to break apart, and others give you energy when you break them apart. It's all in the nitty gritty details of how quantum chromodynamics work. This energy of the strong nuclear force, various arrangements of protons and neutrons, are different energy it it's really technical. But the fascinating thing is that if you fuse atoms together as long as they're light, anything lighter than iron. If you fuse them together and an energy is released, anything heavier than iron. If you split it apart, energy is released, so lighter than iron, you can fuse heavier than iron you can split. So iron kind of sits in the middle. Iron iron, Yeah, iron ironically, And that's why, for example, iron is the heaviest thing that's made in the sun because the sun is just a big fusion bomb and it's making heavier and heavier elements, but it stops at iron because after iron and cost you energy to bake, make anything bigger. But if you have something bigger and you break it, then that gives you the energy back. And that's that's where the bomb comes from, exactly exactly. So a hydrogen bomb is like, you gotta stick these two things together, right, But you know hydrogen is positively charged, So how do you get two hydrogens to stick together. It's not easy. You've gotta squeeze them really really hard. That's why the cost energy. No, that's why dizzy energy. It's complicated because um, when they're really close together, the strong nuclear force takes over, and the process we talked about the releases energy takes over When they're a little further apart. It's the positive charges that take over. So it's sort of like have you ever been to um put putt golf? Right, and you have to get the ball into a hole, But the hole is at the top of a little hill. If you get it just right, boom, it'll stick in the hole and stay there. If you miss a little bit, the hill will push you away. So getting fusion to work is a little bit like that. You've gotta squeeze the hydrogen outs together. If you get them close enough, they will stick and they will release energy. That's like the golf ball falling the hole. If you don't get them close enough, they're just gonna push each other apart. So, the first atomic bombs that we made were hydrogen bombs right now. The first ones were fission bombs or uranium, and then later we made hydrogen bombs. Yeah. And the only way we could make hydrogen bombs was by setting off an atomic bomb. Yeah, So you you need to surround a bunch of hydrogen with nuclear weapons, blow those up, right, so you set off a fission bomb, which creates enough energy density to squeeze the hydrogen to cause it to fuse, which sets off the hydrogen bomb. So hydrogen bomb is really a two step process. It's first, let's do an old fashioned atomic bomb, and that's like the ignition switch for the hydrogen bomb, right, like yesterday's super weapon is today's ignition switch. And so both of these types of bombs have are more explosive than say, dynamite, just because there's more energy inside of the atom then in the reaction between atoms. That's right. All the other kinds of bombs, dynamite and and you know, gas bombs, whatever, those are just releasing the energy and chemical bonds, which is not a lot compared to the energy stored inside the atom. And that's because the strong nuclear force is a super duper strong force, and it just happens that there's a huge amount of energy stored inside the atom. Okay, so it sounds sort of simple. So does that mean that anyone can make a nuclear bomb? It's tricky. You need to get the materials right. Even for a hydrogen bomb, which just requires hydrogen, you need to create fusion, which means creating a vission explosion. So basically the gatekeeper for creating nuclear weapons is getting the nuclear fuel. These days, we rely on the fact that uranium is hard to find. You have to mind it and then you have to enrich it. And so basically, if you want to build a nuclear weapon, then you have to get enough uranium two thirty five. After that, it's not too complicated. Well, well let's get into it. But first let's take a quick break. What prevents just anyone from building a bomb in their backyard, not a whole lot. If you can get your hands on the fuel, you know, if you have enough uranium two thirty five or plutonium or some other material which is good at at splitting, then you can build a nuclear bomb. It's not too complicated. Their schematics out there. If you're really into engineering. Um, but if you want to yeah, um, that part is not secret. Um you used to be. I mean in the fifties, this kind this level of information would get you thrown in jail or executed for treason. Yeah. Probably broadcasting a podcast about how to make one would probably get your arrested too. Let's check with legal before we distribute this podcast anyway, because I'm not so indispending the rest of my life in jail. But it's really just the limitation is the fuel, which is why countries like Iran and North Korea and those folks are building centrifuges. Um, And the way to stop them is to try to stop them from getting the material. You know, one of my favorite stories about geopolitics is the way the Israeli sabotaged the Iranian centrifugures. How did they do it? They wrote a computer virus which specifically targeted the people working at that facility to get them like downloaded and click it and get it to control the centrifugues. It's pretty slick, and it got the centrifuges to spin wrong. So, Um, the difficulty in building a bomb isn't getting the new ger materials, because I mean, it's kind of a big effort not just to mind it, find out where it is minded, and then you have to process it right. And so to do that you need a lot of infrastructure and a lot of factory and money. And so at some point people are going to notice that what you're doing right. Yeah, it's hard to keep that kind of stuff secret. There's not that many people in the world who are good at it, at filtering nuclear materials, and that technology, I read is actually what has kept secret a lot, right, Like the technology actually enriched uranium and what to do it and how to handle it. That one is not like you can't just find that on the internet, right, And if somebody developed a new, cheap, fast, easy way to enrich uranium, we would all be in trouble because that's really the gatekeeper to lots of people get nuclear weapons, because you don't need that much. I mean, you can get a suitcase size bomb that could blow up a major city if you had the nuclear materials. If you had it's pretty terrifying. It's hard to find it in pross it. That's the hopefully the only thing that's keeping us from going up in a big ball of fire. That's right exactly. And so you know, you had to think about the scientists who are working on this kind of stuff, and you know, how do they feel about having developed this technology? You know, Jay Robert Oppernheimer, the guy who led the Manhattan Project, he's famous for having felt both ways about this when he saw the first nuclear bomb go off in New Mexico. You know, he said, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Um. That's pretty serious stuff, right. Um. I've never created something so dangerous, but I would wonder about how I would sleep at night if I created a super weapon. I had to write an article once about nuclear proliferation in and what keeps countries from making these bombs and what's the world order that kind of prevents all this from happening. And what's kind of interesting is that you can take uranium and you start to enrich it, and if you reach a certain point, then that you can use the uranium for good, Like if it reaches about I think it's something like when I say five to seven percent of the uranium to thirty five in it, then that's the stuff you can use for actually good purposes. You mean nuclear power, like generating electricity, generating electricity or medical equipment. Um. But if you leave the machine on longer, if you keep enriching it, then you get to like nine and that's the stuff you can use for weapons. So it's a really tricky balance of like letting people use and make uranium for good stuff, but then you have to watch out to see if they keep going and make it into the bomb type. So it's like that knob on your dryer where you're like, how dry do you want your good for society dry? Or evil destructive? Dry? Yeah? I always choose maximum gry. You always, Yeah, But I like your anecdote because it tells the story. You know that not only is nuclear power potentially the source of superweapons that will eradicate all life on Earth, but also it's a possible source of energy that we need, you know. And everybody's familiar with fission as a source of nuclear power. And you know, a bomb is releasing energy rapidly, but a batteries, you say, is releasing energy slowly. So you can also create a chain reaction that and control it in a way that doesn't run It's not a runaway reaction. Very gradually releases energy. And so that's what they do in power plants. And you know when you hear they have a meltdown, that's because the uranium has gotten too hot, and it's it's uh, chain reaction is started and uh and that's not what you want. You don't want to be blowing up nuclear bombs inside your facility. Yea. And fusion also has tremendous possibilities for the future because fusion is much more powerful, huge amount of energy potentially released. The source of fuel is not this like weird metal you have to dig up the ground uranium. It's just hydrogen, which is everywhere. And the best thing is that there's no radioactive waste fission as a nuclear power source. You get uranium, it turns into this other radioactive crap which lasts for ten thousand years, etcetera. What you can do with it? Well, I think that the cool thing is that the same reaction that makes this bomb, right, like, that's happening in the Sun right now, zillions of times. Yeah, it's just like this continual, simmering giant nuclear bomb. It's going off constantly. Yeah, that's the whole reason we hear. Like, so, so the same idea, like this chain reaction that doesn't have to be this kind of always explosive, you know, destructive things. I mean, the Sun is just like it's just they're burning, continually exploding, and so we could have that on Earth too, right, Like, that's the idea behind fusion energy is that if we could create a mini sun basically like a continual mini nuclear explosion, then think about all the energy we could get from that, that's right, And that was actually my first science job. My first science work ever was in in college. I went into an internship at Los Alamos and worked on their fusion energy program because I thought this would be a good application of this kind of research, This would be a way to help humanity. And it's true, and it's very promising. And as I was saying before, there's no radio back to fall out or or or waste. It just produces helium. The problem is that it's hard to do. You know, they're working on it. We could do a whole other podcast about how to build a little sun on Earth and keep it from turning into a bomb and burning everybody will that'd be cool. So if they make it work, it will not just give energy for everybody, but everybody will get a helium balloon. That's all right, We'll I'll talk kind of like this, Yeah, exactly, lots of side benefits. No, seriously, If fusion becomes feasible and accessible, then we're talking about basically free energy because the cost will just drop very very quickly. And uh, and that would change society. Right. If energy is free, then almost everything is possible. If energy is free, you can make as much drinking water as you like. Right. If energy is free, you can build whatever hole as you like, You can make concrete, you can do all sorts of things. So many problems would be solved if you could get cheap energy, and fusion is the way to do it. It's just really technically tricky. Well, I think the takeaway is that inside of each and every atom there's just an enormous amount of energy, and so that can be either very destructive or very promising to make an incredible future. That's right. Yeah, and so there are both positive and negative potential energies for all the scientific research. Well, I hope that through your mind it fews some ideas in your head together it's split your view of the world. And jokes aside, Please do not try to build a nuclear weapon in your garage. It will not end well. And if you listen to this podcast, be very careful about what you Google is always listening. They were listening. Yeah, Well, thank you so much for joining us, See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com