A Cold Nuke in 2001

A Cold Nuke 2 days before 9/11
Barney Barnum Bohum was no terrorist. Yes, he was called "the worst terrorist in history", but that is just overblown media prose. He was, in fact, a very loyal american, and a pacifist. Yup, he wanted peace (and even prosperity) for everybody. He was also a genius, a dedicated scientist, a gifted technologist... and a hell of an unlucky guy. Barney spent his life horrified with nations exchanging blows, fighting for scraps of the resources that nature sprinkled haphazardly around. He swore to himself that such waste should stop... Yes, he would put an stop to it. "Fusion technology", he thought, was the solution. He would spread abundance everywhere, and nobody would need to to fight for energy again. His electronics shop was located in New York, so he made his research there. By all rights he should have lived and died unknown among the crowds in the giant city - Like many cranks (who knows how many !) did. But BBB was not a conventional crank. He was genial enough, dedicated enough, and, as it turned out, unlucky enough to find a theoretical method of "cold start" of hydrogen fusion that dispensed with high temperatures, extreme pressures or even heavy hydrogen isotopes. His catalytic field, so speak, got energy from the fusion reaction itself in order to drive light hydrogen nuclei together in a simulated stellar environment. The device worked like a lucky gambler. All it required was the amount of energy to provoke a tiny, even microscopic fusion going. The energy from that fusion got re-invested (so to speak) and the gains pyramided many times over... As it turned out, even chemical combinations were a paltry barrier when the Bohum Field exerted its power concentrating protons to be fused.

September 8th - In his toolshed/lab Barney looked, mesmerized, at a tiny sphere of briliance in the center of the big glass tank. Soon, all his dreams would become reality. Not only his altrustic dreams for humanity, but also his personal dreams of fame, prestige... and fortune. Yah, everything he ever wanted would be his. He had already booked a large (in his view) meeting room on Manhattan. He had managed to get a dozen reporters from some fairly decent newspapers, and even got two tech-oriented netshows to send their cameras there. All this depending on this tiny spot of briliance, he thought, looking at the minuscule (less than 1mm of diameter) sphere flickering flame-like. And that was what it was, he though. A tiny, spherical flame that fed on water! Of course, for demonstration purposes it was too little, he had decided a while back. He would have to create a much bigger fusion flame to impress the media. He couldn't have them suspecting an hoax. He conjured up the scene in his mind's eye, and decided a fusion sphere of about 10 cm diameter would be suitably impressive, and still would not boil off all the water of a moderately large tank... Wouldn't boil it off too fast, anyway. He performed the calculations and adjusted the field projector. The fusion flame within a giant water tank, in a darkened room, would look like a miniature sun.. What it would, in a sense, be.

September 9th - The fidgeting audience couldn't decide whether it was bored or puzzled... The media knew Bohum wouldn't have gone the trouble of calling them there without anything to show for it, but his introductory speech didn't say much beyond "a fantastic development in the field of energy sources".Hopefully, whatever he had to show would be spectacular enough to compensate for their tedium....

Now, in retrospective, it is relatively simple to deduce what went wrong in Bohum's project. A simple consequence of Bohum's habits of thought. Educated as an engineer, he got used to think in pessimistic terms... specially concerning the efficiency of technology. Instinctively, he would first suspect any proposed modifications of bringing about a net efficiency loss. Tragically, an efficiency gain can be as deadly - or more - than an efficiency loss. Bohum's increase of the affected space actually multiplied the efficiency of the protonic fusion, with just a slight time -delay. Bohum and his guest witnesses had barely the time to see the ball grow in size to include all the enormous water tank while getting alarmingly hotter and brighter...Before being themselves caught in the explosion that incinerated half Manhattan while broiling the rest in sheer heat and toxic radiation. No signature could be found implying any known nuke of any known origin... Now what happens?

Will people blame the usual suspects, even without evidence?

Will there be war?

This is a twist on an ealier thread, whre the explosion was caused by terrorists with a stolen nuke. Here it wasn't... Will people behave as if it were?
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Cold Fusion? Sorry pal, but this belongs to ASB...
This is no perpetuum mobile.This possibility was never scientifically denied...
What was proved is that the proposed cold fusion processes failed to work.
By no means this forbids that some day one guy like Bohum discovers one process that succeeds at promoting cold fusion.
 
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This is no perpetuum mobile.This possibility was never scientifically denied...
What was proved is that the proposed cold fusion processes failed to work.
By no means this forbids that some day one guy like Bohum discovers one process that succeeds at promoting cold fusion.
Err... Cold fusion might, maybe, be possible in a handful of ways. What you're NOT going to get is a huge nuclear explosion from a tank of water. Just aint gonna happen. ASB I think is only fair here.
 
Err... Cold fusion might, maybe, be possible in a handful of ways. What you're NOT going to get is a huge nuclear explosion from a tank of water. Just aint gonna happen. ASB I think is only fair here.

But there is enough energy inside a penny to power Las Vegas for three weeks why cant a tank of water be the equal of Fat Man or Little Boy
 
Err... Cold fusion might, maybe, be possible in a handful of ways. What you're NOT going to get is a huge nuclear explosion from a tank of water. Just aint gonna happen. ASB I think is only fair here.
Well, nine parts of water
contain one part of hydrogen. That means a cubic tank (filled with water) with sides measuring three meters will contain 3000 kg of hydrogen.
 
But there is enough energy inside a penny to power Las Vegas for three weeks why cant a tank of water be the equal of Fat Man or Little Boy
Because it won't ignite.

Getting hydrogen nuclei together is tough, really tough. The easiest way is to set off an abomb to get the required temperature and pressure.

If cold fusion is at all possible, it's going to be some incredibly wierd set of circumstances that is easily disrupted. Note that all OTL claims have been of handfuls of atoms fusing (and even those are doubtful).

Note that to fuse ordinary hydrogen, you have to get 4 nuclei smashing and sticking, not just 2. That raises the difficulty by orders of magnitude.


Your scenario has a whole bunch of equipment generating some sort of handwavium field in a small space, forcing the hydrogen together. Fine, incredibly unlikely, but probably not ASB, quite. However, if the reaction gets out of hand, it gets out of the field, maybe fries the machinery, and the reaction stops. How does it ignite a tank of water several meters away?


No, sorry, this is ASB
 
Because it won't ignite.

Getting hydrogen nuclei together is tough, really tough. The easiest way is to set off an abomb to get the required temperature and pressure.

If cold fusion is at all possible, it's going to be some incredibly wierd set of circumstances that is easily disrupted. Note that all OTL claims have been of handfuls of atoms fusing (and even those are doubtful).

Note that to fuse ordinary hydrogen, you have to get 4 nuclei smashing and sticking, not just 2. That raises the difficulty by orders of magnitude.


Your scenario has a whole bunch of equipment generating some sort of handwavium field in a small space, forcing the hydrogen together. Fine, incredibly unlikely, but probably not ASB, quite. However, if the reaction gets out of hand, it gets out of the field, maybe fries the machinery, and the reaction stops. How does it ignite a tank of water several meters away?


No, sorry, this is ASB


The guy who came the closest that I am aware of (claimed he did it in super small quantities and wasn't energy positive ie he had to put a whole lot more energy in that he got out) did it with super powerful magnets
 
Your scenario has a whole bunch of equipment generating some sort of handwavium field in a small space, forcing the hydrogen together. Fine, incredibly unlikely, but probably not ASB, quite. However, if the reaction gets out of hand, it gets out of the field, maybe fries the machinery, and the reaction stops. How does it ignite a tank of water several meters away?
1)Sorry if I wasn`t clear enough,
but the field is self-powering. At the magnitude
Bohum tested it originally, it was not efficient
enough for that self-powering to translate
into self-sustaining, but on a larger scale, the efficiency increased enough that the field got
self-perpetuating... Limited only by the availability of hydrogen.
2) As for the tank, that is where the reaction sphere was located. Bohum created the reaction sphere by directing his field emiters to a point
on the center of the tank. At the low level,
(the 1mm diameter sphere) the sphere disappeared when the emmiters were turned off, because the field generated as a by-product of that reaction was not strong enough to keep the reaction going. At the stronger level, (10 cm diameter sphere) the interaction of the fusion with pre-existing field generated a field far
stronger than the necessary to keep the reaction going, and even growing.
 

Bearcat

Banned
It probably belongs in ASB since it requires mysterious 'unknown' physical principles or science. Not impossible, however - something like muon-catalyzed fusion, but far more efficient.

But I doubt the radiation part. The health effects of radiation usually stem from fallout of heavy radioisotopes from a fission reaction. A cold fusion reaction would be cleaner than a normal nuke (though not absolutely so, due to neutron absorption of the device casing, etc.)

In fact, that would quickly tip off the authorities that something strange had happened - no normal isotope fingerprints in the fallout. Most of the radioisotopes would be iron with extra neutrons, from the steel casing, with small amounts of Ni, Cr, Mo, etc.
 
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