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How dense would the atmosphere need to be to result in a cataclysmic chain reaction during a nuclear explosion? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Famously, Oppenheimer and co worked out how close a nuclear bomb test would be to causing a chain reaction of nitrogen fusion in the atmosphere. They made a lot of worst-case-scenario assumptions and still came to the conclusion that no, a nuclear bomb test wouldn’t scour the surface of the world.

But let’s say the atmosphere was twice as dense as it is. Or ten times as dense. At what point would that calculation turn very, very scary?

Obligatory xkcd

Edit: man, seriously, most of the people ‘answering’ this question didn’t even read it.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Prolly the most relevant paragraph from the linked article for this discussion:

Today, especially after the detonation of the 50 MT Tsar hydrogen bomb on Novaya Zemlya in 1961, it is also experimentally verified that the danger of atmospheric or even oceanic ignition does not exist. Also, the experimental measurements obtained by Zucker and others demonstrate that the fusion probability is much smaller than the geometric cross-section for 14N+14N assumed by Teller and coworkers, further reducing the chances for such an event. Furthermore, the atmosphere is also heated only to temperatures of a few million degrees, so that the most efficient energies of the fusing nuclei are a few 100 keV and thus well below the Coulomb barrier and very much reduced by penetrability. These temperatures are noticeably lower than those in the late hydrostatic burning stages of massive stars.

Basically the temperature of the atmosphere is over an order of magnitude too low to have any chance of ignition (need 10s of millions of K), and the reaction rate is thus several orders of magnitude lower than the threshold.