An image captured from the B29 chase plane Necessary Evil
of the actual detonation of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima.
The law of conservation of mass states that in any closed system the ultimate mass of a system must remain constant over time. The law of conservation of energy posits that the total energy of an isolated system also must remain constant. Mass and energy are therefore said to be conserved over time. Both can change forms, but mass and energy can be neither created nor destroyed. They simply change from one state to another.
Take a match as an example. You strike a match and allow it to burn. What’s left is smaller and different from the original match. However, that excess mass didn’t just disappear. It changed forms. As the compounds in the wood degraded they gave off energy and some portion of it turned into a series of gases. That original stuff is not gone. It’s just different.
In the world of physics, this isn’t only not a good idea. It’s the law. However, there is one glaring exception. Albert Einstein codified the details within his extraordinary equation E=MC2.
Nuclear Fission
In the case of nuclear fission, a small amount of matter actually transforms directly into energy. Unlike our burning match example, some mass of fissile material consumed in a nuclear reaction no longer exists in our universe. This matter is physically transformed into energy. The ratio is driven by that equation where E is energy, M is rest mass or invariant mass, and C if the speed of light. As the speed of light is a big number and you are squaring it, the resulting amount of energy you get for a small amount of transformed matter can be truly astronomical.
As weird as all this seems, we can see the practical results clearly enough. It is this reaction that propels American aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. It also drives nuclear power plants.
Despite their simply breathtaking size, aboard a nuclear-powered ship, a small amount of fissile material powers everything from propulsion and catapults to hot water and laundry. Producing 200,000 horsepower non-stop to power the USS Gerald Ford for a week requires less than nine pounds of enriched uranium fuel. These massive ships are expected to run for a quarter century without refueling. The tiny amount of fuel that is actually turned into energy in a nuclear reaction is even smaller yet. Now, hold that thought.
Little Boy was the first nuclear weapon fired in anger.
The Little Boy Test
The atomic bomb unleashed on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, was called Little Boy. This was a relatively simple gun-based device that burned enriched Uranium-235. The term enriched stems from the fact that only about one part in 140 of naturally-occurring uranium is the particular desirable U-235 isotope.
Building the bomb was fairly easy. Harvesting that specific uranium isotope was hard. That’s what the Iranians have been hell-bent on doing for the past decade.
Little Boy was little more than a stubby gun. An enriched uranium target sat at one end and a smaller uranium projectile resided at the other. At the point of detonation a chemical explosive fired the projectile down the internal barrel into the target and achieved critical mass for a spontaneous detonation.
The plutonium-based bomb, Fat Man, which dropped on Nagasaki three days later, was a more complicated implosion design. It was this mechanism that was detonated during the Trinity test in New Mexico. The first operational test of the Little Boy bomb was the Hiroshima attack. Most of the uranium used in Little Boy came from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo.
A Single Paperclip
Once ready to go Little Boy sported an all-up weight of 9,700 pounds. Of that mass was 141 pounds of enriched uranium. The average level of enrichment was around 80%. Upon detonation around two pounds of uranium underwent nuclear fission. Of the bit that burned, only 0.7 grams or around 0.025 ounce was actually transformed into energy. This is roughly the same mass as a dollar bill or a paperclip.
The bomb was deployed from the B29 Superfortress Enola Gay at 0815 in the morning. It fell for 44.4 seconds before its dual redundant time and barometric triggers fired the ignition charges. The weapon detonated 1,968 feet above ground, and the resulting explosion released 63 Terajoules’ worth of energy — the equivalent to 15,000 tons or 30 million pounds of TNT (Trinitrotoluene) high explosive.
The fireball was 1,200 feet in diameter with a surface temperature of 10,830 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly comparable to the surface of the sun. Every man-made structure within a mile of ground zero was instantly pulverized. The resulting firestorm was roughly two miles in diameter. Survivors reported a strong smell of ozone, as though they had been near a powerful electrical arc. This unprecedented explosion killed 66,000 people and injured another 69,000, all for the cost a single paperclip’s worth of enriched uranium.
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I Hate This 500 Magnum
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Oh Dear!
Behold my nemesis. This thing hates me, and I hate it right back. It breaks catastrophically about every other year or so.
I have a nemesis. Webster’s Dictionary defines nemesis thusly, “The inescapable agent of someone’s or something’s downfall.” I think that about sums it up. My nemesis is a toilet.
Back nearly 20 years ago when my wife and I were building our first and last house together, I had a series of modest requests for our general contractor. I was tragically born without any sense of style or taste, but I do have a knack for utility. I’m an engineer by training, so I expect stuff to work. I don’t much care what it looks like.
When it came time to scheme out the bathrooms I didn’t have an opinion about the drawer pulls or whether or not the paint matched. As an aside, matching colors for anything is simply the diabolical manifestation of some massive worldwide female cabal. I’m colorblind, so I apparently don’t appreciate color like a normal person. At least that’s what my wife claims. Whether it is drapes, socks, slacks, or housepaint, those matching rules that women are always touting aren’t written down anyplace. I don’t think they even exist. If I want to paint a room asparagus green alongside vibrant coral I don’t see how that somehow offends the fabric of the universe. Not that I’m bitter…
Anyway, I had but one stipulation for the bathrooms. I didn’t care what the toilets looked like, how efficient they were or how much they cost. I just wanted them to be able to reliably flush a freaking bowling ball. I have sons, and I never wanted to touch another toilet bowl plunger.
My buddy who built the house came through like a champ. There had been some recent federal guidelines on toilet design (apparently because we all desperately needed our toilets regulated by the federal government). The new toilets use about a thimble’s worth of water per flush and won’t dispose of anything more robust than a mature raisin. He found us some retro toilets someplace made before the Real Man Toilet Ban. I have a mental image of some seedy-looking guy dressed like a 1970s-era pimp discreetly selling illicit toilets out of the back of a derelict van, but maybe it wasn’t quite that bad. Regardless, these were some seriously epic toilets.
Thomas Crapper, toilet maker to the stars. It was he who first
brought the flush toilet into the mainstream.
The father of the modern flush toilet was an Englishman named, and I’m not making this up, Thomas Crapper. Mr. Crapper was born in 1836 and died in 1910 of, appropriately enough, colon cancer. He didn’t technically invent the toilet, but he did perfect the floating ballcock. The floating ballcock was universally acclaimed as the creepiest mechanical name in the world until it was displaced in 1967 by the Wankel Rotary Engine. In the 1880s, Crapper was granted a Royal Warrant to provide sanitary facilities for the British royal family. This gave him the dubious distinction of being responsible for the king’s excrement.
Our new black market toilets did not use Mr. Crapper’s floating ballcock. The mechanism inside these things looked like some kind of space shuttle part. It had ball bearings, sliding sleeves, and springs aplenty. It also worked like a champ … for about two years. Then, one by one, each of the epic manly toilets in our house began to die.
This is the Flushmaster. What a piece of crap.
I’m a pretty handy guy, so I replaced the entrails in each of these toilets with replacements from Home Depot. The most popular is called, no kidding, the Flushmaster. I’m presuming this was because something more accurate like Crap Blaster might unduly offend the less durable members of society. Ever since then these stupid things have died every couple of years like clockwork. I think the one I just replaced was the fifth iteration thus far, and we’ve been in the house about seventeen years.
Back in my day, the inside of a toilet consisted of little more than a big bulbous copper float and a simple but ridiculously over-designed mechanical valve. Nothing was made of plastic, and they never failed. You were expected to pass those toilets on to your great grandchildren. Nowadays, the mechanical bits are formed from something that looks like Happy Meal toys and all but come from the factory broken.
Just like tactical shooting, with practice comes both speed and accuracy. I replaced this latest fill valve in six minutes without tools. My first order of business was to throw away the instructions unopened, as I am able to quote them from memory by now. By the time you read these words this set of toilet guts will likely be well on its way to dying as well. If ever you needed evidence that the world is going down the toilet, there you have it.
