I want to either build my own nuclear reactor or else be the chief designer of an atomic or hydrogen bomb. If the bomb doesn’t go off, or, if the reactor doesn’t do whatever reactors are supposed to do, I want to be able to go and troubleshoot them.
Will just one degree give me the smarts to do this? If so, which one?
Thanks,
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Probably the quickest route would be to join the Navy, and be trained as a nuclear technician there. But I don’t think you can choose your own specialty when you join: You can put in a request, but they’re not bound to honor it.
Try nuclear engineering. This might only be available as a graduate program; in that case physics, mechanical engineering or chemistry would provide the foundation for the graduate program.
And if you don’t have strong math skills and the desire to grind away at math day in and day out for years on end…give it up.
In addition to jeberts comments you’ll also need to know control theory, and electric power engineering.
Practice, practice, practice.
Ok, uh. Nobody has this level of skill. A bomb design team needs more than 1 person’s worth of skills. There are nuclear physics experts who understand why it works, there’s mechanical engineers and explosives experts who design the actual pieces in the device to meet the specs, etc. A nuclear physics PhD is what a lead designer on a bomb would be, but you would not be qualified to fix a nuke if it wasn’t working.
There’s various technicians - mechanical and explosive and electronics techs - who actually know how to put together the fine pieces that go in the device, and who can troubleshoot faulty systems and are experts are various fine motor tasks like fine soldering, drilling tiny holes in precise places, using a lathe, etc etc etc.
The closest I can think of is you would get a Phd in nuclear physics and do post-docs at Sandia or Oak Ridge, etc.
One problem is that while after you reached a certain clearance level, you might be able to see the blueprints of a real bomb, and you might get to perform fission experiments with radioactive materials, you wouldn’t really get to design a new bomb and blow it up. I don’t think you’d quite reach the same skill level that the guys who actually did bomb design for reals reached because everything you produced would only be tested on paper. No flash, no mushroom cloud, no empirical results.
Your biggest problem is both things you mentioned are dying industries. After the messup in Japan, and the fact that solar and natural gas have gotten very cheap, I think nuclear’s done. I don’t think any new civilian power plants will be built anywhere but maybe a few in China. Even China may scrap it. Natural gas turbines + solar + compressed air storage is a pretty good solution.
Assuming no Cold War 2, there won’t be any more nuke development. There’s an untested warhead that is supposed to be designed to blow up because of absurd margins in every design dimension that might replace the current stockpile. A few caretaker tasks like that. Nothing like the glory days where the size and power and reliability of weapons got improved by a huge amount.
Troubleshooting? Become an engineer, or work for the DoE at one of their National Laboratories.
Render weapons safe? Become an EOD Technician, but this requires either enlistment or a commission in the US Armed Forces.
This level of technology is compartmentalized by the government, meaning that no one person will have all the knowledge and technical skills to develop a weapon–and that’s by organizational design. You might be able to learn and work with the physics package, but you will have rudimentary knowledge about the firing set. You might know about the chemistry involved in manufacturing fuels and the explosives, but you won’t know how to shape them. This way, no one random dude can spend all his time and energy developing weapons that can threaten a large amount of people. I can break them before they function as designed, but even then I need to consult publications which are restricted until I call back to a specific 24/7 hotline to have them send me the pubs on the particular steps.
Tripler
Been there, done that.
So it’s the movie True Lies, and you’ve got a warhead from a soviet ICBM in front of you, with a big ole bundle of wires sticking out of the casing that appear to be soldered on recently. Maybe a battery stuck in there. And, of course, a ticking timer. Got 5 minutes before it blows.
Whatcha gonna do? There’s no hotline to call. You do have your whole EOD truck worth of tools. And there’s a beautiful woman tied up nearby. And you’re in the middle of a major city during rush hour.
Grab a drill and drill some random holes into the outer casing where other stuff isn’t in the way. Do it mostly in the same side/area of the bomb.
Now it won’t work (nuclear explosion wise that is). Heck, even one hole might do it.
I saw an interview once on TV with a Pakistani nuclear scientist. He said that
i) There are probably only a few hundred people on earth at any given time who have sufficient knowldge to make a nuclear weapon…(he was one of them apparently).
ii) That he doubted that he could make one on his own even if given all the materials needed, or even a group could.
I’m actually an engineer who works on vastly simpler systems. I have a fairly broad breadth of knowledge, I do GUIs, high performance multithreaded C++ code, microcontrollers, FPGAs, and basic filter and other analog circuit design. Yet, I can’t do board layout, my fine soldering skills are limited, a nice Korean lady does the really close in work, I don’t touch operating systems (I try to use OS independent libraries to abstract that part of the problem away) any more than I have to, high power electronics design I need a EE to help with.
A nuclear bomb not only uses high end electronics but a whole range of mechanical and of course nuclear systems. What I’m saying is, from my own experience, I don’t think anyone, anywhere in the world has the skills to do all the steps in design and construction of a nuclear warhead. It’s not just compartmentalization, there is an impractically large amount of stuff to learn.
Well. If someone worked their whole life on nothing but, maybe they’d know enough to make a crude bomb, if they started with few kilograms of weapons grade uranium.
For bombs, get a job at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, TX, where America’s nukes are assembled. It’s also where there are disassembled for refurbishment or destruction.
And it’s apparently a laid back place. According to their wiki page, more than 500 guards went on strike a few years back because they didn’t want to carry “heavy” guns on their shifts.
IIRC the US no longer detonates nukes for testing purposes. It is all simulated on super computers now.
…That’s what I said. A fission experiment is some kind of controlled fission reaction in the laboratory, such as placing a small, subcritical mass of uranium near a neutron reflector.
No, you don’t understand. We aren’t building new nuclear weapons anymore.
I think I know of the individual you mention. I am not a fan of this guy.
If I had an ICBM in front of me, there’s an entirely different world of problems. An ICBM is a delivery platform for the warhead. But, in keeping with your query . . .
Hollywood question? Hollywood answer with my dose of reality: I’d grab a sledgehammer and start whacking. Oh sure me and the babe would be toast, but once I get the casing open, I know enough on what to smash to hopefully reduce the nuclear yield.
You’re absolutely right. Nuclear weapons are finely tuned machines meant to initiate a supercritical event under exact command authority and under highly-demanding mechanical and environmental conditions. Completely different world than the consumer electronics you and I have worked on (I’m a EE by training).
Tripler
“Sorry babe, just close your eyes and think about fluffy bunnies. You won’t feel a thing.”
That’s not true.
Did you read your cite?
That’s the entirety of the second paragraph of the article.