Quote:
Originally Posted by mjohnson
We do lots of things that nobody else does, or maybe even ever has done. For science or for the that bomb thing, we do what we need to do.
Then the ninnies come in and whine about the cost...
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I work with a number of guys that came from Los Alamos. I've heard good stories.
Exactly. We do what we need to do. We produce the neutrons by firing pulses of protons at liquid mercury at 60 Hz. Roughly 10E15 protons per pulse traveling at about 90% of the speed of light. Knocks the neutrons right off of the mercury molecules. Of course, then due to conservation of momentum, the neutrons are moving pretty fast, so we need to slow them down and channel them - hence the beryllium and supercritical hydrogen at 20 K.
Believe it or not, this process actually produces cavitation in the liquid mercury which damages our 316L vessels that hold the mercury requiring replacement about three times/year. We did some testing at Los Alamos years ago (WNR) to understand the fundamentals of the phenomenon, but now wrestle with the realities of cavitation damage. Here's a photo of what started out as a round disk of material we removed. We have to cut, clean and photograph all of these remotely as the ~2.5" diameter disk below is reading about 100 R/hr. The whole module is greater than 50,000 R/hr when we remove it...
This place is insane.