from Hacker News

Ask HN: Nuclear Cruise Missile Fuel

by zunzun on 8/13/19, 4:00 PM with 3 comments

The recent civilian video showing the very large shock wave from the recent Russian offshore military explosion, as evidenced by condensation behind the shock wave front, indicates either a low-power nuclear detonation or massive chemical explosion. Since the fission reaction rate for normal density plutonium is too low to achieve nuclear explosive yield, plutonium must be imploded to give sufficient density for nuclear detonation. Presumably the nuclear cruise missile motors would not have been built with implosive shells of high explosives, which seems to indicate that the nuclear motor fuel was uranium-235. Does this reasoning seem correct?

  • by gvb on 8/13/19, 4:12 PM

    Speculations on the Nenoksa Explosion[1] is interesting. I'm not qualified to judge its accuracy.

    The author's opinion is that it had to have been U-235:

    "When you are concerned about weight, as a cruise missile designer must be, the places to look in these designs would be the moderator and reflector for the reactor. Highly (above 90%) enriched uranium is the only possible fuel; plutonium is too hard to handle, and lesser enrichments add too much weight. The moderators in the Tory and Rover reactors also served as structural elements."

    [1] https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2019/08/11/speculations-o...

  • by hindsightbias on 8/13/19, 4:28 PM

    If youre talking about one of these videos, they are from the munitions dump in Siberia, not where the nuke missile tests were

    https://observers.france24.com/en/20190806-residents-russian...