Bucky Bomb

I was watching a program on explosives, shaped charges and i had an idea.... ok this may be dumb... But what if you filled a bucky ball (buckminsterfullerene) with hydrogen atoms, then bonded / coated it in high explosives round the outside, could you make a tiny h bomb by doing that? it could be used as some kind of futuristic fuel ...

Originally posted by e4chris
I was watching a program on explosives, shaped charges and i had an idea.... ok this may be dumb... But what if you filled a bucky ball (buckminsterfullerene) with hydrogen atoms, then bonded / coated it in high explosives round the outside, could you make a tiny h bomb by doing that? it could be used as some kind of futuristic fuel ...

Be careful, you've used naughty words there,you are now under secret service surveillance and a dangerous person to know!!!! 🙂

Originally posted by e4chris
I was watching a program on explosives, shaped charges and i had an idea.... ok this may be dumb... But what if you filled a bucky ball (buckminsterfullerene) with hydrogen atoms, then bonded / coated it in high explosives round the outside, could you make a tiny h bomb by doing that? it could be used as some kind of futuristic fuel ...

How big do you think a "bucky ball" is?

Do you know what an H-bomb is?

Originally posted by e4chris
I was watching a program on explosives, shaped charges and i had an idea.... ok this may be dumb... But what if you filled a bucky ball (buckminsterfullerene) with hydrogen atoms, then bonded / coated it in high explosives round the outside, could you make a tiny h bomb by doing that? it could be used as some kind of futuristic fuel ...

Nah, you couldn't fit enough hydrogen atoms inside a bucky ball to get close to break even...
And you would need a helavalot more compression and heating than chemical explosives could provide.

Hitting it symmetrically from all sides with lasers with a combined power greater than the US electricity
grid at peak load might work.

But that would consume way more energy than you would get back out...
And we don't make lasers that powerful that can accurately hit a target that small.

Originally posted by OdBod
Be careful, you've used naughty words there,you are now under secret service surveillance and a dangerous person to know!!!! 🙂

Bah. We looked at the designs for designing an A bomb in my senior school physics class.

You can design an A bomb (but not an H bomb) on the back of an envelope.

The hard part is not designing one, but building one... Which is bloody hard, fortunately.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Bah. We looked at the designs for designing an A bomb in my senior school physics class.

You can design an A bomb (but not an H bomb) on the back of an envelope.

The hard part is not designing one, but building one... Which is bloody hard, fortunately.

is it possible to make one that would not detonate the laboratory? like a physics challenge...

Originally posted by e4chris
is it possible to make one that would not detonate the laboratory? like a physics challenge...

If you are asking whether you can make a nuclear warhead with a yield so small the you
could detonate it inside a room without destroying that room then the answer is no.

You could make an AM warhead any size you like, assuming you can manufacture the AM.

But a nuclear warhead requires a critical mass of nuclear materiel to be able to function.
It is possible (but illegal by international treaties) to make a so called 'micro' nuclear device
with a yield in the hundreds of tonnes of TNT range rather than the more normal thousands
to millions of tonnes of TNT.

Designs for such warheads were developed for the ORION project, a spacecraft propelled by
detonating nuclear warheads behind it and riding the shock waves.

But a full blown nuclear warhead that small isn't possible.


They do generate nuclear explosions in the 'lab' at a couple of facilities in the USA.
But they use giant machines to generate (by various methods) high enough temperatures and
pressures on a D-T target that it fusses into helium.

But they consume more energy than they output and are the size of a couple of football pitches.

Originally posted by e4chris
I was watching a program on explosives, shaped charges and i had an idea.... ok this may be dumb... But what if you filled a bucky ball (buckminsterfullerene) with hydrogen atoms, then bonded / coated it in high explosives round the outside, could you make a tiny h bomb by doing that? it could be used as some kind of futuristic fuel ...

They have no problem absorbing hydrogen into a metal making hydrides that hold the fuel for compression. So would it be easier to fuse hydrogen in a bucky ball than a metal hydride?

Originally posted by joe beyser
They have no problem absorbing hydrogen into a metal making hydrides that hold the fuel for compression. So would it be easier to fuse hydrogen in a bucky ball than a metal hydride?

The more contaminates you add the harder fusion becomes.

To get fusion going you want hydrogen atoms hitting hydrogen atoms.
You don't want them hitting metal atoms they are not going to fuse with.

Also adding in lots of heavy atoms soaks up lots of heat energy because
they are harder to get moving fast so getting enough high energy collisions
gets harder.

Given that a bucky ball has carbon atoms that are relatively lighter than
the vast majority of metal atoms you would probably do better trying to
fuse hydrogen in a bucky ball... except that they are so damn small that
they would be almost impossible to compress fast enough.

And the energy output would be too tiny to bother with.

The targets they currently use are around the millimetre scale... and not the
nano meter scale. And they have trouble hitting those hard enough.

GF what is an AM warhead? i looked it up and i can't find it, do you think the ban on small warheads is holding back physics.

I like the idea of the physics challenge, chemists die on average 10 years younger then physicists due to the chemicals and using acetone as washing up liquid, it would be good to see the physicists taking some risks 🙂

Originally posted by e4chris
GF what is an AM warhead? i looked it up and i can't find it, do you think the ban on small warheads is holding back physics.

I like the idea of the physics challenge, chemists die on average 10 years younger then physicists due to the chemicals and using acetone as washing up liquid, it would be good to see the physicists taking some risks 🙂

Anti Matter = AM

And no I do not think that the ban on micro nukes is holding back anything.


It's just stopping another nuclear arms race.

Originally posted by e4chris
GF what is an AM warhead? i looked it up and i can't find it, do you think the ban on small warheads is holding back physics.

I like the idea of the physics challenge, chemists die on average 10 years younger then physicists due to the chemicals and using acetone as washing up liquid, it would be good to see the physicists taking some risks 🙂

You scare me with the acetone comment. I have used it a bunch on the hands.

Originally posted by joe beyser
You scare me with the acetone comment. I have used it a bunch on the hands.

what do you use it for? it kills chemists because it washes chemicals of lab equipment into there skin when cleaning up, think it can dissolve fat in the skin and 'washes' other chemicals in, its not that toxic of its own accord.

Originally posted by joe beyser
You scare me with the acetone comment. I have used it a bunch on the hands.

Of course. Its nail-polish remover.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Nah, you couldn't fit enough hydrogen atoms inside a bucky ball to get close to break even...
And you would need a helavalot more compression and heating than chemical explosives could provide.

Hitting it symmetrically from all sides with lasers with a combined power greater than the US electricity
grid at peak load might work.

But that would c ...[text shortened]... k out...
And we don't make lasers that powerful that can accurately hit a target that small.

I am probably wrong, but i'm not covinced surely if you coated one with enough explosives it to could create enough force at least, otherwise how does a larger bomb work?