[Basic] Skill of the week: Explosives

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I suspect the dangers of explosives are also routinely exaggerated in order to discourage people from trying. Kinda like the drug exaggerations of the . . . 80s, right?

Also probably an aspect of the safe firearm handling rules approach that overcautious is much better than an accident. When it comes to hazards that are both serious and not normalized, a 95% chance that nothing will go wrong tends to be considered appallingly reckless.

[Not]

It comes down to this: how do you prefer to die? If you like accident or disease, there's a prescribed path for that. If you'd prefer to be killed by a hobby, there's options for that too.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Not

It comes down to this: how do you prefer to die?

I'll take "cooked in the heat death of the universe" thank you.

[Rockwolf66]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Also probably an aspect of the safe firearm handling rules approach that overcautious is much better than an accident. When it comes to hazards that are both serious and not normalized, a 95% chance that nothing will go wrong tends to be considered appallingly reckless.

I'm friends with three EOD trained individuals. One of those individuals was an accident Investigator. While very rare accidents with explosives do happen. They are quite nasty when they do happen. Think chunky salsa.

All three of the EOD were Military trained and at least one of them had to deal with terrorist devices. It says volumes that among terrorist groups that blowing themselves up by accident is common even among the experienced ones.

Outside of those three I used to know a guy who ran with the Soldier of Fortune crowd back in the 1980s. He once saw a cowboy type keep blasting caps in a cigarette case. Said cowboy is now called stumpy as a static charge set off the caps while the guy was opening the case.

Then you have the idiots who pick up a copy of the "Anarchist Cookbook" or some other "Explosives manual" and then try and make their own explosives. I'm surprised that crickets* are as common as they are. Really anything not made by a trained professional out of industrial components is an accident waiting to happen.

*explosive filled C02 cartridges. A very easy way to lose fingers or a hand.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Oh, not just legend. Messing with near-criticalities was something that definitely happened, and killed a few physicists too.

Look up the Demon Core ...

[dcarson]

I many years ago saw a theoretical design for a gun type fission device that used a 3 story townhouse. Run a tube from attic to cellar, fill the cellar with sand/rubble/concrete to act as a tamper. Put one part of the bomb at the bottom of the tube, put the other part at the top with a heavy concrete weight on top of it, cut rope. You want good guide rails and a conical shape to the two pieces so they self align.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by malloyd

It's not so much that the reaction is slower that causes the fizzle as the geometry never gets to the right point. As the subcritical bits get closer together they heat up from the increasing fission rates. The trick to getting a nuclear explosion is to get them close enough together in a shape with a low enough surface area (from which neutrons are escaping) relative to their volume. In principle heated air might push apart colliding hemispheres, but you might not get even that far doing it by hand, because the pieces get hard to hold on to as they heat up, and once they melt (or *vaporize*) you can't push on them at all and it doesn't take much flow before the assembled mass isn't a sphere, and hence has more surface area that you planned for.

The suddenly generated cloud of metal plasma glowing in neutrons and x-rays will certainly kill you, and likely anybody else in the same building, but still is several orders of magnitude less destructive than if you had set it off properly.

I really, really want to do this because it sounds AWESOME. I have to keep telling myself that it would be ridiculously fatal immediately.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

I'll take "cooked in the heat death of the universe" thank you.

Heat death refers to the break down / cessation of all matter and energy except a very tiny forever fading modicum of heat.
Still, I prefer to get squirted into a different younger universe long before then.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Heat death refers to the break down / cessation of all matter and energy except a very tiny forever fading modicum of heat.
Still, I prefer to get squirted into a different younger universe long before then.

I'll make that choice when it comes. I may decide I'm done with life by then.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I suspect the dangers of explosives are also routinely exaggerated in order to discourage people from trying. Kinda like the drug exaggerations of the . . . 80s, right?

Well they have to try to deal with idiocy like this: people buying unexploded artillery shells dug up on WWI battlefields and trying to take them back to the UK through the Chanel Tunnel.