Then you use soap to trap the gas in bubbles, creating a pan of miniature H-bombs. Lye strips away aluminum oxide, allowing the water and metal to react and generate hydrogen. ![]() The sodium hydroxide solves this problem. But when you merely submerge aluminum foil in water, the two materials cannot complete the reaction: A film of aluminum oxide forms on the surface of the foil, blocking H 2O from coming into direct contact with the metal. This is a surprisingly easy process, which only requires three things: water, aluminum foil, and sodium hydroxide (a caustic chemical better known as lye, which is the primary ingredient in many drain cleaners).Īctually, water and aluminum can react all by themselves, producing hydrogen gas and an acid called aluminum hydroxide. To pull this off, you’ll first need to make hydrogen. DIY hydrogen (bubble) bombsĮnough about history-on to the DIY! By flowing hydrogen though a pan of soapy water, you can collect gas-filled bubbles on the surface of the liquid, then ignite them with a long-handled lighter. So compress that major highway worth of explosions onto an island into the Arctic, and you might start to appreciate the sheer power of hydrogen. Of course, Tsar Bomba wasn’t stretched across the entire United States. Imagine placing a Sailor Hat pile of TNT every 135 feet along the entirety of Interstate Highway I-40, which runs for 2,555 miles between Barstow, CA and Wilmington, NC. This interstate stretches across the entire width of the United States, covering 2,555 miles.īut Sailor Hat was a little too small to compare properly to the Tsar. In this video, the TNT ignites at about 0:20. Then they ignited the TNT-and filmed the explosion. Nearby, they arranged obsolete ships that engineers had outfitted with instruments and sensors to reveal how explosion-resistant Navy ships needed to be. In April 1965, government technicians stacked up 500 tons of TNT in a Lego-like dome on Hawaii’s Kaho’olawe Island. So let’s put these nuclear numbers into perspective.įirst of all, what does one ton of TNT even look like? To answer this question, we can study Operation Sailor Hat, a series of US Navy tests designed to examine how nearby explosions affect warships. In fact, Tsar Bomba’s explosive power-50 megatons of TNT-is so vast that most people simply can’t wrap their heads around it. While a hydrogen bomb still includes a fission reaction, this simply acts as a trigger to set off a fusion reaction, which melds hydrogen together-and releases mind-boggling amounts of energy in the process. That a-bomb drew its power from fission, splitting atoms open to releasing the energy within. The resulting mushroom cloud stretched 40 miles into the sky, the height of 145 Empire State Buildings stacked one atop the other.įor context, the first atom bomb explosion, the U.S.’s 1945 Trinity test, only released the explosive equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. ![]() The blast completely destroyed buildings more than 30 miles away, produced enough heat to cause third-degree burns 60 miles away and to be felt 170 miles away, and released a shock wave that broke windows hundreds of miles away. That’s twice as powerful as the United States’ largest-ever weapon, the B-41 nuclear bomb. When the Soviet Union detonated this fusion bomb over Novaya Zemlya, an Arctic archipelago the USSR used as a testing ground, it yielded the equivalent of 50 million tons of TNT. Think of it like bursting bubble wrap, but with a classy historical and scientific pedigree.īack to the Tsar. So I made and ignited hydrogen-filled bubbles, which detonate with a small-but-satisfying pop and a flash of yellow flame. While I’m not eager to build a thermonuclear weapon in my garage, I do enjoy playing with hydrogen. This month marks the 56th anniversary of “Tsar Bomba,” a massive hydrogen bomb test that still holds the record for the most powerful human-created explosion ever.
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