Sorry I called you camlem, samclem. I had it written out SamClem then messed up the fixing.
But seriously, on track? There never was an “on track” here for GQ.
I already answered the “GQ”.
This thread has no business here.
He wants to debate somebody’s intentions.
But you need such inordinate precision in your machine tools and other production and engineering equipment that I cannot accept that you could buy the necessary materials, including such things as the exotic metals you’d need, from Home Depot (assuming, of course, that one possessed all the skills necessary). As you know, even with billions of 1940’s dollars, the Manhattan scientists and engineers faced nearly insurmountable difficulties. To do what you suggest is essentially equivalent to building an entire high-tech, industrialized civilization from scratch using nothing but what you could buy from Home Depot.
But I do understand that you’re deliberately stretching hypotheses to extremes pretty much as an exercise rather than arguing that it’s genuinely possible in the real world to make a nuke from Home Depot parts.
Leaving aside the partisan wrangling, I’d have to dispute the initial assertion. I suspect that the original claim was that you could build a nuclear bomb using parts commonly available at a hardware store (why give *Home Depot[/i a free plug? I’ll bet Lowe’s would be as good. Or your neighborhood hardware store) except for the fissile material. And, unless your bomb was a fairly crude “gun” type (uses a lot of fissile material, but it works and is relatively easy to make), I doubt if you could get all the parts you’d need at a hardware store – you can’t walk into my local Home Depot and get explosives, so you’d be making your own or concatenating them from teeny sources. This is not the way to put together sensitive shaped charges for implosions and the like.
There was the case of the Princeton student who wrote a bachelor’s thesis on building a bomb about 20 years ago (but he replied on commercial specialty explosives, if memory serves), or the magazine article on how to build a bomb from 25-30 years ago. Heck, pick up Rhodes’ books on the atomic and hydrogen bomb, or Tom Clancy’s novels and you’ll find a lot of the details in there. But not everything, and some steps require fine machining and designed explosives and sometimes special radioactive initiators (like polonium). So saying that you can build one using parts from a hardware store is hyperbole, like the physicist I knew who claimed anyone could build a grating spectrograph from scratch in his basement.
“How?” I asked.
“Well, first you get a nail and a piece of glass and make a diffraction grating…”
One must understand what is meant by a dirty bomb vs. a “nuke”. A dirty bomb is a device that can pepper an area (doesn’t have to be a huge area) with nasty stuff, often using radiological materials.
Gotcha! By 3 whole minutes too. 
I’m glad I never had to go for that merit badge. (WTH is there an Atomic Energy merit badge?!?)
The problem is that when you are trying to check out your bucket of Plutonium, the SKU is not in the computer system. After the nineteenth page for a price check from the fissile materials aisle, you give up in disgust and begin culturing biological weapons from the “Hometown Buffet” cole slaw.
1.) Yes, there is (or at least was, back when I was a oy Scout) an Atomic Energy merit badge. There was no experimental section, though.
2.) IIRC, a lot of the radioactive material that Bot Scout got was actually from a bottle of radium paint, meant for touching up the luminous paint on clock hands, that he found inside one of the radium-dialed clocks at a flea market. Trying to collect a lot of radioactive material by collectingf strips of Americium from smoke detectors requires a lot of gathering. A whole bottle of radium paint gets you plenty of pre-reg curies at once.
[nitpicks]
A. I never said he was doing experiments for his merit badge. You assumed that.
B. Guess you missed the second line of my post
[/nitpicks]
[nitpicks nitpicks] I was responding to Shibboleth’s citing of your quote. *He’s the one who brought meritb badges in.
Guess you missed the last line of the quoted post before my comment. [/nitpick nitpick]
[nitpicks nitpicks] I was responding to Shibboleth’s citing of your quote. He’s the one who brought merit badges in.
Guess you missed the last line of the quoted post before my comment. [/nitpick nitpick]
[nitpicks nitpicks] I was responding to Shibboleth’s citing of your quote. He’s the one who brought merit badges in.
Guess you missed the last line of the quoted post before my comment. [/nitpick nitpick]
My sister and I are off to Home Depot this morning. This being the North (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario), we may be able to find some …interesting… stuff there. 
Ahhhh!!
Sorry about that multipost
[Chekhov]Must be the radiation[/Chekhov]
You might find a little 'ore there though.
I think they meant a Radiological Device, & the Congresscritter got confuzzled. 
And I’m utterly certain you could, on simple reflection of what they keep there.
And a big shout-out to the NSA Boys who are doubtless peeing in their jodhpurs whilst they peruse this Thread.
Send me a post card from Texas, boys! 
OK, I get it.
I’m sorry I mixed you guys up.
OK, I get it.
I’m sorry I mixed you guys up.
[This is a test of the new hamster friendly multipost]
First you buy a 10 million smoke detectors. The rest is just engineering.
According to the scientific literature, the fissionable materials are sold separately, and should be obtained from your local terrorist organization or perhaps the Junior Achievement in your neighborhood.
What kanicbird was referring to has little in common with Pons-and-Fleischman kind of cold fusion.
When electrons are replaced by heavier muons, the smaller atoms have reduced coulomb repulsions between them. Luis Alvarez produced “cold” fusion this way in the 1950s. It’s not really cold, but it requires temperatures much lower than traditional fusion. In order to give the atoms a decent chance of meeting each other before the muons decay, the temperature has to be pretty high (several thousand kelvins, IIRC). There appears to be little practical use for the effect, since it costs more energy to produce the muons than you get back from the fusion.