Re: Specimen (AU with aliens) T/K Adult 2/12
Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 4:01 pm
They had showered together again this morning...and her body still felt warmed by the caresses that had somehow replaced the requested scrubbing of her back. But they were back at the computer...back to playing chess, while they tried to pool as much knowledge as they had between them about how the weapon under their computer might work, and how they might go about defeating it. Tess found herself wishing she had the knowledge of this 'Liz' person that Kyle knew, and perhaps she felt just a twinge of jealousy about the respect Kyle had for her. But as she felt his love flow towards her through the connection Tess smiled. Whatever happened, she knew...Kyle was her soulmate...and if he wouldn't yet love her body and soul...she certainly had no reason to fear that this Liz-person would somehow supplant her in Kyle's affection. If only she just knew what the girl knew, but while a dictionary could give you vocabulary it didn't much give you content or context.....and apparently nuclear devices were a rather specialized subset of human knowledge...not like football or basketball.
But Tess needn't have felt so inadequate, because in fact no one knew the totality of what that bomb could do, although the people who controlled the facility believed they did. But that had always been a problem with so-called 'black world' programs, because the secrecy they needed always led to a certain loss of understanding of the potential consequences of such programs. In the case of the facility, none of the people who had handled the various segments of the isolation plan for Tess had ever had ever had a 'need-to-know' the whole story, and for that reason it had been kept from them. The nuclear device itself was a rather ancient one.... a so-called A-bomb.... dating from the 1950s that had been designed and built before the interlocks requiring presidential authorization codes had been built in to every nuclear device in the US arsenal. The actual weapon itself had an undistinguished history. After over a decade of being in place in a cave in South Korea to collapse a mountain pass in the event of North Korean invasion, it had been returned to the United States in the late 1960s for destruction. That destruction had never occured. Oh, on paper, ithe device did not exist at all, it had been documented destroyed and its U-235 reclaimed....but in a nuclear stockpile that had literally tons of fissile material. it had been relatively easy to hide the loss of 10 kilograms, and if you looked at the papers that had audited the destruction, that small amount was supposedly in a secure nuclear waste dump at the Hanford Atomic Works in Washington State over a thousand miles from Roswell.
The concept of a fission device is fairly simple...and the key to it was to create a self sustaining chain reaction of fissionable material and for that you needed fissile material. . Fissile materiel was material that, under the right conditions, could produce self sustaining nuclear fission. There were in fact, a lot of materials known to Earth science that were fissile...Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 being the most practical as bomb making material.
The half century old nuclear device buried in the desk under the computer was made of Uranium-235, a naturally occurring isotope that made up a very small percentage of naturally occurring Uranium, the rest being mainly Uranium-238. One of the most difficult processes in the construction of a nuclear weapon was to take the Uranium and separate the lighter...fissionable... U-235, from the rest of the Uranium. This was done with a process involving gas diffusion of Uranium Hexafluoride...not what you'd do in the West Roswell High Chem lab certainly, but when you were done you had fissionable U-235 and the leftover uranium...something that had come to be known as 'depleted' Uranium, since it had been depleted of its U-235. The depleted Uranium was practically pure U-238....but we'll get back to that later.
Once you had purified U-235, however,the problem was not so much one of making an atomic bomb, but rather preventing one from occuring by accident. If a sufficient amount of fissile materiel was brought together, it initiated the chain reaction on its own, and this amount was something known in the nuclear physics business as a critical mass. A physicist would tell you that it would be wrong to think of a criticalmass as a 'weight' of material. In fact, the amount of U-235 in the sphere under the desk was far below the weight of U-235 that would under ordinary conditions become critical at all. Criticality depended, in its essence, on the amount, shape, density, and neutron flux within the mass being sufficient to allow the chain reaction to be self sustaining rather than to damp itself out. To avoid an explosion, it was always necessary for fissile material to lose the neutrons produced by its spontaneous decay at a faster rate than those neutrons caused fission events within the mass of the fissile material. Generally you accomplished this by either keeping the total amount of fissile small or having it in a shape that was non-spherical or had voids in it...that permitted enough neutrons to escape that the few remaining were unlikely to interact much with their fellow fissile atoms. As long as that happened, a chain reaction would not happen.
On the other hand, there were things you could do to decease the actual mass required for a nuclear rection such as to coat the outside of the fissile material with neutron reflectors like Beryllium, Tungsten, or.....for that matter, depleted Uranium. I told you we'd get back to that later, and we still aren't done with it. The other common way was to use shaped charge explosives to condense the fissile material...make it more dense, which rather dramatically decreased the amount of fissile materiel required for criticality, and provided a method to trigger the device at will.
The bomb under the desk was what was called an implosion device, and it was intended to be a mini-nuke...small, clean, and not particularly powerful as nuclear weapons go, although in truth nuclear weapons go rather far in that direction. It had a subcritical sphere coated with beryllium to reflect the neutrons back, and a small amount of Tritium-Deuterium whic would, once the chain reaction was started, boost the neutron production to allow the relatively small amount of U-235 to a briefly self sustaining fission reaction that would produce, by nuke standards, a small explosion.
And if that was all there was to the story, the device would have probably performed as advertised, incinerating everything within a hundred feet of ground zero, and for almost a half mile down the tunnel system, and even then blocked only by the three large blast doors between the holding cell and the rest of the underground complex. But that was most definitely NOT the rest of the story, because the compartmentalization of the black world project had kept the left hand from knowing what the right hand was doing, and of course, there was also another factor that no one knew at all, that dramatically affected the likely outcome in the event of the device being triggered. But, that's one of the problems with black world projects.
The single thing that most directly led to the current situation was the decision to line the entire room with depleted uranium. No one explained that decision to the guy who installed the nuke, he didn't have a need to know. And even if he knew, he may or may not have really understood the significance of that, he was a demolition guy...not a theoretical physicist. A theoretical physicist would have been appalled had he/she known what they wintended.
Depleted uranium isn't fissile, but it IS fissionable. It won't sustain a nuclear chan reaction, but if it's in the area, it will definitely add fuel to the fire. By encasing the bomb itself in depleted uranium the people who ran the Facility inadvertently accomplished a number of things. First, they added fuel to the device, which was going to make the explosion bigger. Secondly they added a second layer of neutron reflector that once the chain reaction was started, would reflect neutrons back into the chain reaction that would have otherwise been lost. That too would make the explosion bigger. The third thing it did was add mass to the outside of the fission device. That would keep the reacting mass together for just a few milliseconds longer, which of course would make the explosion bigger. The final thing it would do, really wouldn't make the explosion bigger, but the whole purpose of making the device small with very little fissile materiel to begin with was to limit the total radiation that would be released. By putting nearly a ton of depleted uranium into the coating of Tess's room, the depleted uranium would become neutron activated and very dirty.
But as bad as that was, that was only part of the problem...the part that a theoretical physicist could have told them about, had the physicist had the 'need to know' and ben asked. The other problem was unknown to anyone....what a lonely young girl who could do molecular manipulation...and limited sub molecular manipulation, could do if you kept her locked up and bored for almost a decade. What no one knew, and what would have caused true nightmares for a theoretical physicist, was that the young girl had tried for almost five years to manipulate the matter right above the nuclear device, and while that matter had started out as Uranium 238, her years of effort had managed to convert a sizable chunk of the depleted uranium into a mixture of Plutonium 239 and Uranium 235....both fissile materials. So when the bomb beneath it went off, the area that Tess had manipulated was going to go off too, and between the two bombs there would be a lens of fissioning material ... a hellish plasma of thermonuclear violence...that would hold together and fission far more completely...far longer...than had ever been the intentions when the mini-nuke was constructed or embedded in the Facilty.
So, unknown to those who ran the Facility, what was sitting in the room was a device that,, were it to be detonated, would NOT be the relatively clean fractional kiloton equivalent device that had been built by Sandia Labs in the early 1950s, but rather a rather dirty fractional megaton device.
And when and if it blew, the mile of tunnel and three blast doors between the holding cell and the REST of the facilty, were going to be scant protection against the hellish blast of the device that squatted under the computer where Tess and Kyle were playing chess and making their plans for escape......
But Tess needn't have felt so inadequate, because in fact no one knew the totality of what that bomb could do, although the people who controlled the facility believed they did. But that had always been a problem with so-called 'black world' programs, because the secrecy they needed always led to a certain loss of understanding of the potential consequences of such programs. In the case of the facility, none of the people who had handled the various segments of the isolation plan for Tess had ever had ever had a 'need-to-know' the whole story, and for that reason it had been kept from them. The nuclear device itself was a rather ancient one.... a so-called A-bomb.... dating from the 1950s that had been designed and built before the interlocks requiring presidential authorization codes had been built in to every nuclear device in the US arsenal. The actual weapon itself had an undistinguished history. After over a decade of being in place in a cave in South Korea to collapse a mountain pass in the event of North Korean invasion, it had been returned to the United States in the late 1960s for destruction. That destruction had never occured. Oh, on paper, ithe device did not exist at all, it had been documented destroyed and its U-235 reclaimed....but in a nuclear stockpile that had literally tons of fissile material. it had been relatively easy to hide the loss of 10 kilograms, and if you looked at the papers that had audited the destruction, that small amount was supposedly in a secure nuclear waste dump at the Hanford Atomic Works in Washington State over a thousand miles from Roswell.
The concept of a fission device is fairly simple...and the key to it was to create a self sustaining chain reaction of fissionable material and for that you needed fissile material. . Fissile materiel was material that, under the right conditions, could produce self sustaining nuclear fission. There were in fact, a lot of materials known to Earth science that were fissile...Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 being the most practical as bomb making material.
The half century old nuclear device buried in the desk under the computer was made of Uranium-235, a naturally occurring isotope that made up a very small percentage of naturally occurring Uranium, the rest being mainly Uranium-238. One of the most difficult processes in the construction of a nuclear weapon was to take the Uranium and separate the lighter...fissionable... U-235, from the rest of the Uranium. This was done with a process involving gas diffusion of Uranium Hexafluoride...not what you'd do in the West Roswell High Chem lab certainly, but when you were done you had fissionable U-235 and the leftover uranium...something that had come to be known as 'depleted' Uranium, since it had been depleted of its U-235. The depleted Uranium was practically pure U-238....but we'll get back to that later.
Once you had purified U-235, however,the problem was not so much one of making an atomic bomb, but rather preventing one from occuring by accident. If a sufficient amount of fissile materiel was brought together, it initiated the chain reaction on its own, and this amount was something known in the nuclear physics business as a critical mass. A physicist would tell you that it would be wrong to think of a criticalmass as a 'weight' of material. In fact, the amount of U-235 in the sphere under the desk was far below the weight of U-235 that would under ordinary conditions become critical at all. Criticality depended, in its essence, on the amount, shape, density, and neutron flux within the mass being sufficient to allow the chain reaction to be self sustaining rather than to damp itself out. To avoid an explosion, it was always necessary for fissile material to lose the neutrons produced by its spontaneous decay at a faster rate than those neutrons caused fission events within the mass of the fissile material. Generally you accomplished this by either keeping the total amount of fissile small or having it in a shape that was non-spherical or had voids in it...that permitted enough neutrons to escape that the few remaining were unlikely to interact much with their fellow fissile atoms. As long as that happened, a chain reaction would not happen.
On the other hand, there were things you could do to decease the actual mass required for a nuclear rection such as to coat the outside of the fissile material with neutron reflectors like Beryllium, Tungsten, or.....for that matter, depleted Uranium. I told you we'd get back to that later, and we still aren't done with it. The other common way was to use shaped charge explosives to condense the fissile material...make it more dense, which rather dramatically decreased the amount of fissile materiel required for criticality, and provided a method to trigger the device at will.
The bomb under the desk was what was called an implosion device, and it was intended to be a mini-nuke...small, clean, and not particularly powerful as nuclear weapons go, although in truth nuclear weapons go rather far in that direction. It had a subcritical sphere coated with beryllium to reflect the neutrons back, and a small amount of Tritium-Deuterium whic would, once the chain reaction was started, boost the neutron production to allow the relatively small amount of U-235 to a briefly self sustaining fission reaction that would produce, by nuke standards, a small explosion.
And if that was all there was to the story, the device would have probably performed as advertised, incinerating everything within a hundred feet of ground zero, and for almost a half mile down the tunnel system, and even then blocked only by the three large blast doors between the holding cell and the rest of the underground complex. But that was most definitely NOT the rest of the story, because the compartmentalization of the black world project had kept the left hand from knowing what the right hand was doing, and of course, there was also another factor that no one knew at all, that dramatically affected the likely outcome in the event of the device being triggered. But, that's one of the problems with black world projects.
The single thing that most directly led to the current situation was the decision to line the entire room with depleted uranium. No one explained that decision to the guy who installed the nuke, he didn't have a need to know. And even if he knew, he may or may not have really understood the significance of that, he was a demolition guy...not a theoretical physicist. A theoretical physicist would have been appalled had he/she known what they wintended.
Depleted uranium isn't fissile, but it IS fissionable. It won't sustain a nuclear chan reaction, but if it's in the area, it will definitely add fuel to the fire. By encasing the bomb itself in depleted uranium the people who ran the Facility inadvertently accomplished a number of things. First, they added fuel to the device, which was going to make the explosion bigger. Secondly they added a second layer of neutron reflector that once the chain reaction was started, would reflect neutrons back into the chain reaction that would have otherwise been lost. That too would make the explosion bigger. The third thing it did was add mass to the outside of the fission device. That would keep the reacting mass together for just a few milliseconds longer, which of course would make the explosion bigger. The final thing it would do, really wouldn't make the explosion bigger, but the whole purpose of making the device small with very little fissile materiel to begin with was to limit the total radiation that would be released. By putting nearly a ton of depleted uranium into the coating of Tess's room, the depleted uranium would become neutron activated and very dirty.
But as bad as that was, that was only part of the problem...the part that a theoretical physicist could have told them about, had the physicist had the 'need to know' and ben asked. The other problem was unknown to anyone....what a lonely young girl who could do molecular manipulation...and limited sub molecular manipulation, could do if you kept her locked up and bored for almost a decade. What no one knew, and what would have caused true nightmares for a theoretical physicist, was that the young girl had tried for almost five years to manipulate the matter right above the nuclear device, and while that matter had started out as Uranium 238, her years of effort had managed to convert a sizable chunk of the depleted uranium into a mixture of Plutonium 239 and Uranium 235....both fissile materials. So when the bomb beneath it went off, the area that Tess had manipulated was going to go off too, and between the two bombs there would be a lens of fissioning material ... a hellish plasma of thermonuclear violence...that would hold together and fission far more completely...far longer...than had ever been the intentions when the mini-nuke was constructed or embedded in the Facilty.
So, unknown to those who ran the Facility, what was sitting in the room was a device that,, were it to be detonated, would NOT be the relatively clean fractional kiloton equivalent device that had been built by Sandia Labs in the early 1950s, but rather a rather dirty fractional megaton device.
And when and if it blew, the mile of tunnel and three blast doors between the holding cell and the REST of the facilty, were going to be scant protection against the hellish blast of the device that squatted under the computer where Tess and Kyle were playing chess and making their plans for escape......