Tsar Bomba Fusion Essay

The Tsar Bomba is the biggest nuclear explosive ever tested and has an explosive yield equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT, imagine if that same energy was used to generate power, minus the destructive side effects. Stars already do this, and emit the energy created by fusion as electromagnetic radiation and particle radiation, such as visible light and alpha particles, two neutrons and protons bound together. Fusion is technically a form of nuclear energy, but the radiation caused from it is actually lower than the background radiation people find themselves in daily. There are no harmful by products of fusion, only helium, making it clean and eco-friendly. Like nuclear fission, fusion reactors use the heated generated by a fusion reaction to

The radiation and heat generated by fission, primarily X-rays, is able to heat deuterium-tritium fuel until it becomes plasma, as well as compress it until the point of fusion. The resulting release of neutrons is able to make even normally non-fissionable materials to undergo fission, such as depleted uranium. Because of this, thermonuclear bombs have both a ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ type. The dirty variants use a uranium jacket around the fuel and the clean variants use a lead jacket. Whilst the Tsar Bomba is the biggest bomb ever created, it is rather difficult to find information about it, so for an example we shall be looking at the B41 nuclear bomb used by the United States military from 1961 to 1976. The B41 was a three-stage bomb, with each stage representing a nuclear reaction. The first stage was a fission reaction, which is primarily used to initiate fusion. After the first stage goes off, the second stage is compressed until fusion occurs, which then initiates an even larger third stage, which is also fusion. Like most thermonuclear bombs, the B41 had a ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ variant, which each had a yield of less than 10 megatons and 25 megatons