Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/16/22 Ethan Siegel: How Hot Are Nuclear Bombs?

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Ethan Siegel joins Scott to discuss the science behind the temperature of thermonuclear explosions. Scott is putting together a new book that argues for the abolition of nuclear weapons called Hotter Than The Sun. He wanted to talk with an expert who can actually explain how the bombs are able to reach temperatures that far exceed the center of the Sun. Siegel wrote an article on that exact topic a few years ago, so he’s the perfect person to answer that question. At the end, they also talk about some of the things to avoid if you find yourself in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.        Discussed on the show: “Ask Ethan: How Can A Nuclear Bomb Be Hotter Than The Center Of Our Sun?” (Forbes) Ethan Siegel is an astrophysicist, author, professor and science communicator. He’s won numerous awards for science writing since he began blogging in 2008. His blog Starts With A Bang is now housed at Forbes. Follow him on Twitter @StartsWithABang. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys introducing ethan seagull and he is the editor of starts with a bang which is the science contributors group at forbes magazine isn't that interesting and he wrote this piece a couple of years ago called Ask Ethan, how can a nuclear bomb be hotter than the center of our sun?

Welcome to the show, Ethan. How are you doing? Hi there, Scott. I'm doing very well. Thanks for having me on. And thanks for being willing to take on such an interesting and unintuitive question. Yeah, well, I'm very interested in it. And in fact, I'll go ahead and tell you, I'm putting out a book called Hotter Than the Sun Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and it's a compilation of interviews that I've done over the last, say, 15 years or so

with different experts about nuclear weapons and then it occurred to me that nobody talks about nukes being hotter than the sun anywhere in the book. And I thought, well, you know what? I'll just interview the guy that wrote the entire article about it and then we'll make this the afterward. So, welcome.

You're being transcribed. well that's great i hope your audio transcription software is flawless yeah well i got human men to help you know what it is too is i talked with daniel ellsberg and he talked with the guys who were there for real and they told him at least some of them gave it a 10% chance one in 10 at the trinity test that they would ignite all of the nitrogen and hydrogen in the atmosphere and the oceans and burn it all off and kill every last living organism on Earth. And then they did it anyway. And then it turned out, don't worry about it, man.

It's not going to ignite all the nitrogen and hydrogen in the atmosphere. It's fine. But they didn't know that. They were willing to risk that. And then they set off the thermonukes that, as you explain, evidently burn even hotter than that. And luckily, they have not burned off our entire atmosphere as of yet. But it's interesting to note that that's the kind of mad science that we're dealing with here. Is it really possible to stop beating around the bush?

Is it really possible that a nuclear bomb can burn hotter than the sun, the center of our solar system? Say it ain't so, Ethan. Come on. Well, so to spoil the answer, the answer to that is absolutely yes. You have to remember when it comes to temperature, when we talk about temperature, we talk about it occurring in a region of space. Now, the sun is enormous. So the sun is going to have more heat than even if we launched and detonated all the nuclear bombs at once all over the earth, right? If we had all the nuclear bombs we've ever made and we detonated them all at once, this would still be minuscule in terms of the total energy output compared to the sun.

But in terms of the total energy output in a specific region of space, yeah, the sun's core is really hot. but it's not like that energy is very concentrated. That energy is spread out over an enormous volume of space, whereas when you detonate a nuclear weapon, it all gets detonated. That energy all gets released in one tiny, tiny volume of space. And that's where you can exceed the temperature of not just the surface of the sun, but even the absolute center of the sun. Wow. All right. Well, hang on. How do you know how hot it is in the absolute center of the sun, Mr. Science Man? Well, that's so wonderful that you introduced me as a Mr. Science Man, because we have the sciences of astronomy and physics that tell us how the sun works. So we know, okay, what's the sun made out of? Well, we have both theory and observation, and that tells us about 70% of the sun is made out of hydrogen. and about 28% is helium and about 2% is everything else combined.

So most of the sun is hydrogen. Then you can say, okay, well, what goes on with this hydrogen in the sun to make it happen? And I tell you, well, thankfully, we have the science of nuclear physics pretty well figured out that we know the conditions under which different atomic nuclei will react to either fizz apart or fuse to together. So you can say, well, what's going on inside the sun? And you say, okay, well, we're going to have hydrogen fusing into, through a chain reaction, the element helium. So you'll get protons and protons fusing together, and they will make the first heavier isotope of hydrogen deuterium. And then you say, okay, well, we're going to take deuterium and either a proton or another deuterium

atom and we're going to make either hydrogen three or helium three. And then you say, okay, we're going to build that up step by step. And at the temperatures we release in the sun, you're going to say, okay, well, look at what we get out. We should get hydrogen fusing into helium and we should be able to calculate how often this fusion reaction occurs. And then you'll say, well, but how sure are you that you're correct and I'll say, well, very, because one of the things we can say is when you have these nuclear reactions, one type of particle they also produce is called neutrinos. And we've been detecting neutrinos from the sun since the 1960s. And it turns out that when you understand neutrinos and you understand nuclear fusion, you can say, all right, fusion only

occurs, the hydrogen fusion into helium only occurs when you get past a threshold of about 4 million Kelvin. That takes place pretty much in the inner 50% of the sun by radius. And then you can say, and if you go all the way down to the core, based on things like neutrino energy, based on things like fusion rate, how hot does the sun get at its absolute hottest in the very center? And the answer is an enormous number, but it's still pretty small. It's only about 15 million Kelvin. All right. Now, so if I set off a thermonuclear bomb, say, I don't know, a megaton, how hot do those burn? All right. So when you say thermonuclear, that tells me we're not just doing nuclear fission here. What we're doing is we are having a little fission bomb that's going to trigger this thermonuclear

reaction that's going to trigger nuclear fusion. So the way you can do this is you can say, I'm going to have a nuclear fusion bomb and, yeah, it's going to blow up outwards. But inside the bomb, I'm going to have a little chamber that has something like a hydrogen pellet in there. And when that hydrogen gets surrounded by this detonation fission reaction, it's going to compress it. And that's going to trigger the thermonuclear part. That's going to trigger the hydrogen bomb part, which is going to get the hottest of all. And bonus, sometimes that hydrogen bomb will emit neutrons, which will cause the fission reaction on the outside to proceed even

faster. So the physical explanation is, okay, we have all this stuff going on in the sun, but it's got an enormous volume to it, right? The majority of fusion is occurring in the innermost few percent of the sun, but that intermost few percent of the sun is still larger by a lot than the planet Earth. It's still hundreds of times larger than the planet Earth. So when you say, okay, that's how the energy is distributed. Now, how is the energy distributed in a nuclear bomb? It's that, okay, it only happens in this tiny, tiny volume of space. The number of particles that fuse together, the number of fusion reactions in a given volume of this nuclear explosion is much greater than the amount of nuclear reactions that occur in a given

volume of the sun. They also take place over a much shorter amount of time in a nuclear explosion, right? The thing about the sun is it's relentless. It's fusing all of these protons together all the time. It's a continuous thing. But in a nuclear reaction, it happens in this tiny volume of space all at once. And that's how the nuclear explosion can outheat even the center of the sun. Yeah. Well, and then so luckily, the cool Pacific air is empty of these hydrogen isotopes and the chain reaction does not continue throughout the atmosphere and the ocean and the rest. So how quickly does the temperature fall off to reasonable sub-sun temperatures? Well, that's that's kind of the beauty of it right we we have and i can go back to physics again and say

hey have you ever uh gone and decided to take your lips and make a very small opening like you were you were puckering them up and you tried to blow air out of them right what does that air feel like if you hold your hand in front of your lips when you put them together with just a tiny opening and you blow onto your hand. That air feels cool, doesn't it? But that's a little weird because when you open your mouth wide and you breathe out like you have hot air. In fact, you have body temperature air, right? About 98 degrees Fahrenheit coming out of your mouth. So why does that air fear cool? Why is that air cool when you have your mouth just. make a tiny, tiny opening. And the answer is something called adiabatic expansion. There are a lot of

ways that gas can expand, but if you just allow it to freely expand in the environment of space, if you allow it to rapidly expand, adiabatic is what it's going to do, and it's going to cool it down. Same thing, if you adiabatically compress something, it'll heat up. That is how the pistons in your car engine work. The piston presses down. It heats the gasoline up, and the gasoline combines with oxygen in the air and ignites. And that's why, boom, you get these little explosions when the piston presses down. And that's what powers your car. That's what makes the engine turn. That's what makes that power is used to turn the drive train, the wheels. What happens when you ignite this? when you ignite this hydrogen bomb, this thermonuclear device, immediately you do get this

enormous temperature that doesn't just get hotter than the sun. It gets like maybe 20 times hotter than the sun. Whereas the sun gets up to about 15 million degrees, the thermonuclear test detonations done by the USSR and the USA have been recorded at hundreds of millions. of degrees. They've gotten up to 200 or even 300 million degrees. But the thing is, they only get there for a small fraction of a second. As the milliseconds tick by, the rapid, rapid heating of the air and the material that's in the air, it expands and it expands so rapidly that it starts to cool off very, very quickly. So if you say, oh, well, a second after this thing detonates, is it still hotter than the sun? And the answer is no. Only for a fraction of a second does it reach

those temperatures hotter than the sun. And that's good for us because that prevents it from doing things like triggering spontaneous combustion of the atmosphere in the oceans. That would be bad, and thankfully, that doesn't happen. So the reason that these hydrogen bomb blasts are so much hotter than the interior of the sun is because of the short time scale the explosion happens on, is the concentrated volume that this reaction happens within, and the fact that now, once it goes off, it starts expanding rapidly, which means it cools rapidly. Therefore, it only stays at that ultra-high temperature for a very, very short period of time.

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with backyard chickens. That's free rangefeater.com slash Scott. Good. Well, it's still enough to kill all a Houston in one shot, but luckily not turn it into its own separate star. Right. And if you talk about the Trinity blast site, you can discover that there was a new type of mineral that was made during the atomic bomb explosion, right? The Trinity test site explosion. The material's called Trinotite because the explosion was so hot that it baked the sand and, you know, baked the impurity. within the sand, and it created this radioactive material that we call trinotite, which is like this green radioactive glass. And there are only a few days a year that they allow you onto this site. But if you rent a Geiger counter and you go onto that site, you can still find these pieces

of glass lying around. They call it trinotite. And it's because, you know, not at millions of degrees, but because even at thousands of degrees, that whole surrounding landscape can get baked. So you can say, oh, yeah, I'm not worried about being hotter than the sun, but being way too hot for humans, for life, for the buildings we build, that's a very real concern. And that's why these atomic bombs are so destructive over such a large region on Earth. Like you said, you put a well-placed bomb over a city like Houston or any city in the world, and devastation is the only word to describe it. It's going to be absolutely terrible.

Now, let me ask you this. When they're testing these things under the ocean, were they taking any greater risk of a chain reaction of the hydrogen or that kind of thing since it's so much denser than the air? and unable to cool off in the same kind of way? You know, the thing that you'll worry about is you say, okay, if I'm injecting all of this energy into the ocean, what's going to happen? Can I trigger the chemical reaction that turns water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas?

Yes, you can. And then would that hydrogen gas explode under the heat by reacting with the oxygen gas. And you'll say, yeah, it'll do that too. But you don't gain extra energy out of that because the energy of the atomic bomb blast made the hydrogen and oxygen fuel out of water. And then when the hydrogen and oxygen react again, it just goes back into becoming water. So you don't get any extra net energy out. The big problem you get from doing underwater tests is, hey,

One of the problems, remember I talked about it earlier, when you have these fusion devices, is they produce free neutrons. Fission also relies on neutrons. If you have neutrons entering your water, that is going to produce deuterium when one neutron hits a hydrogen nucleus. Okay, deuterium's no big deal. It's stable and it's not poison. You know, you don't want to drink G2O instead of H2O for a long time, but getting a little bit of deuterium in your water isn't bad. The problem comes when you add a second neutron to hydrogen and you make something called tritium. Tridium is a radioactive waste product with a half-life of about 12 years. So you do run the risk of injecting an enormous amount of radioactivity into your water

when you perform an underwater test. This is actually a very big problem for nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants use water to cool them, and one of the byproducts is tritiated water, is this radioactive water. So if you're a fan of the Simpsons and you remember Monty Burns's three-eyed fish, Blinky, it was lampooning it, but it's also a realistic problem that you do have to worry about the radioactivity of your water. So even though we decided, okay, we don't want open air tests because of radioactivity, it turns out that underwater nuclear tests are also pretty bad for the environment. If you have to conduct a nuclear test, and I hope you don't, but if you have to, your best bet is to conduct it underground so that any radioactivity remains safely buried as well as possible. The whole thing is, you know, most of the byproducts you produce, they do decay pretty fast. And the ones that do decay pretty fast that wind up in the air, those tend to be what we call alpha emitters. They tend to emit helium nuclei.

And you can stop those with pretty much the outer layer of your skin cells. The danger is if you inhale them. Because if you inhale them and they sit in your lungs and they're radioactively decaying in there, that's a wonderful recipe for cancer. So, you know, I would recommend against doing something like that. So like you say, if a nuclear bomb goes off, don't go outside and take a bunch of deep breaths to try and get as much of that debris into your lungs as possible. That would be bad.

But hopefully we won't have World War III where it's Vladimir Putin versus the entire world, and we won't suffer from mass nuclear fallout. Yeah. Well, against the West anyway. And yeah, so, well, good question. I mean, how far out of town should I be if they nuke Austin? Well, assuming they can aim properly, there's the initial blast radius where if you're caught in that, you're going to die immediately. And then outside of that, there's a radiation zone where you will die that horrible, painful death over a long period of time, like many of the residents of Hiroshima did, over the decade. following the nuclear attack on them in 1945. So you want to get beyond the blast zone and the radiation zone. And although that typically depends on the type of bomb used, I would say if you are more than about 20 or 30 miles away from the detonation site, you should safely consider yourself out

of the radiation zone. Oh, that's good. And then as far as the fallout and all that, you think a few weeks would be good enough? before you can go outside? A lot of that will depend on weather conditions, and that's not something that's really predictable at this point more than a week out under the best of circumstances. So I would say just like we have monitoring where we know toxic things are going to occur, like at Hawaii, they have Hawaii Volcano Observatory that tells you when it's safe and when it's not safe to breathe in that combination of volcanic gases and smog,

I think we would need to wait for the announcements for something like that. I have a lot of faith that that is something that the United States government and the scientists working for the government would take an interest in broadcasting in order to keep people safe in such an event. Yeah, if any of them are still alive after getting us into such a mess. Yeah, I mean, it's not a pleasant situation to think about. And, you know, we've- That'd be funny, power devolves to the head of the National Weather Service.

I mean, it's important, though, right? Because you get these nuclear fallouts, and you get these radioactive particles going in various places, and just like different types of pollution can land in different places, you want to make sure that, you know, okay, if something went off in Austin, and then it comes around the world and it starts landing in Anchorage, you want to make sure that the residents of Anchorage are not all dying of radiation poisoning because you failed to track where the nuclear debris went. Yeah. All right. Well, I wonder how prepared they are for the National Weather Service after the nuclear apocalypse to keep track of the fallout clouds.

I couldn't tell you that. I'm planning ahead over there at the Rand Corporation, you know. Oh, you're getting all Howard Hughes on me. They're the guys who had the plan for, here's how we can provoke Russia without probably leading to too bad of a backlash. So I hope they're the ones who are getting the National Weather Service prepared for Dr. Strange Love Days here. Well, may the future be kind to us

and may we never need to find out. Seriously. All right. So everybody, you heard them. It's Ethan Siegel. The bad news is the age bombs, yeah, they burn at a few hundred million Kelvin, but only for a moment

and then it's cool after that, so we can rest assured. Thank you so much, Ethan. Oh, thank you. It was my pleasure to be here. All right, you guys. Ethan Siegel, again, senior contributor at the Starts with a Bang contributor group at Forbes magazine.

The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com. Anti-war.com Scott Horton.org and Libertarian Institute.org.