/sci/ - Science & Math » Thread #12949872

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Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 12:40:29 2021 No.12949872 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>12949876

Hey /sci/,
Is the shockwave from a nuclear explosion in and of it's self emitting or relating to the emission of ionizing radiation or particles?

Or is it just a standard explosive shockwave that's carrying radioactive debris from the bomb?

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 12:42:10 No.12949876 Report

Quoted By: >>12949883

>>12949872
A shockwave is just an abstraction for a moving region of high pressure. How can it emit anything? It doesn't even exist in the same conceptual space as particles and radiation and shit.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 12:45:06 No.12949883 Report

Quoted By: >>12949897 >>12951633

>>12949876
>A shockwave is just an abstraction for a moving region of high pressure. How can it emit anything?
That's what I thought.

So theoretically people people who are only mildly hit by the shockwave from a nuke should be fine since they were far from the center and the shockwave it's self is not radioactive. All that would happen is they would get knocked over.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 12:47:41 No.12949891 Report

Quoted By:

Interesting notion, radiation probably isnt the main effect but it does energize air particles a bit so that would effect pressure waves

Makes me imagine spicy air and gas strains causing snuggly logic helixes in the atmosphere, wrapped around in spacetime crystals and diffuse ratio densities and hyperspatial fullness

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 12:49:26 No.12949897 Report

Quoted By: >>12949920

>>12949883
Well sorta yes but no, my point is that a shockwave is not something that can emit anything the same way you can't do integrals on spaghetti.

But in purely applied terms you're correct, just getting hit by a shockwave in itself does not irradiate you, you need to either get exposed to radiation directly from the blast (gammas, neutrons) or get radioactive gunk on you that emits the same kind of radiation with a delay

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 12:56:03 No.12949920 Report

Quoted By: >>12950091 >>12950424

>>12949897
>But in purely applied terms you're correct, just getting hit by a shockwave in itself does not irradiate you,
I wasn't sure if the source of the shockwave mattered, like somehow because it's a nuclear shockwave it's magically radioactive but I realized that sounded dumb.

After reading a lot about radiation I get the feeling the dangers of radiation from nuclear weapons is overplayed. The nuclear element just seems to be the trigger for the big explosion and not the primary killer considering that the nukes detonate way above the ground and the radiation goes in every direction.

I think for you to be in lethal dose range, you would already be dead from the blast.

Not saying it's not bad, or dosen't leave things radioactive but I think it's somewhat overplayed. You could probably survive being on the outskirts of it.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 13:46:12 No.12950091 Report

Quoted By: >>12950216

>>12949920
>After reading a lot about radiation I get the feeling the dangers of radiation from nuclear weapons is overplayed.
Absolutely. The biggest contaminant is irradiated dirt that gets kicked up in groundburst explosions and rains down later (fallout). Besides a tiny increase in cancer rates it's mainly dangerous when a lot of it rains down in a small space, which can be quite dangerous. But even a lot of that decays quite quickly.

If you need proof that the media exaggerates nukes, just consider the fact that Nevada has been nuked literally hundreds of times.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 14:22:51 No.12950216 Report

Quoted By: >>12950277 >>12950311

>>12950091
And yet there were huge increases in thyroid cancer across the midwest in the cold war to the point that it was the subject of a congressional hearing.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 14:30:39 No.12950241 Report

Quoted By:

>By the late 1970s, hundreds of damage claims had been filed against the U.S. government alleging that illnesses, primarily cancers, resulted from the nuclear tests.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100848/
This study estimates between 13,000 and 200,000 excess cancer cases, with a highest probability of 49,000 cases. Idk what the mortality of various cancers were with cold war medicine.
Going back to the OP question, the shockwave is just pressure effects from superheating a cubic mile of air or thereabouts. How radionuclides are distributed in that air is a problem for supercomputers to solve.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 14:38:10 No.12950277 Report

Quoted By:

>>12950216
Thing is they were doing a lot of fucked up and dangerous things with radiation in the 80's. We nuked space 13 times. We were blasting gama rays down to the ground for radar on commercial aircrafts, essentially cancer rays. I'm sure theres more fucked up things going on considering the whole devil sphere thing kept happening.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 14:46:53 No.12950311 Report

Quoted By: >>12953676

>>12950216
Oh, sure, but that's hardly the same thing as the postcapocalyptic hellscape envisioned in fallout games.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 15:14:34 No.12950424 Report

Quoted By: >>12951610 >>12951652

>>12949920
In almost all cases the blast lethality radius is far larger than the prompt radiation lethality radius, radiation is the primary killer only in some smaller weapons.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 20:36:09 No.12951610 Report

Quoted By: >>12951617

>>12950424
I knew it!
That means all my studying had yielded fruit!

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 20:37:58 No.12951617 Report

Quoted By:

>>12951610
http://johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nukergv.html

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 20:42:13 No.12951633 Report

Quoted By:

>>12949883
Not necessarily. It depends a lot on the design of the weapon. Also, human bodies are surprisingly effective at withstanding blast waves. A person could potentially be relatively unharmed by the blast, but still receive 3rd degree burns over a significant portion if theur body and/or receive a major dose of radiation from neutrons or inhaled particulates

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 09 Apr 2021 20:46:44 No.12951652 Report

Quoted By:

>>12950424
Yep. Neutron bombs are designed to have the radiation burst radius exceed that if the blast, but they're some of the weakest warheads ever fielded

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 10 Apr 2021 06:44:09 No.12953676 Report

Quoted By:

>>12950311
>the media is overexaggerating everything
>the media: fictional computergames for teenagers

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