Sometimes people's lack of science scares me

[beccaelizabeth]

Stories pretty often suffer from a basic lack of understanding how humans work, so lack of understanding nuclear weapons isn't exactly a surprise, but still.

Adding plutonium to an exploding arrow does not make it a bigger explosion. Regular explosives are violently exothermic chemical reactions. Nuclear explosions are, well, nuclear, a whole different deal. To make nukes go bang they put the nuclear material in the middle of the explosive so it'll get squished together to form a critical mass. That means it doesn't go boom while it's waiting and smaller amounts of material can be coaxed into boom. But you still need a critical mass. Which is, google and wiki suggests, somewhere around 5kg for a really worrying element plus explosives.

You do not stick 5kg on the end of an arrow.

Smaller amounts of nuclear material just add radioactivity and poison to your boom stuff. Plutonium is a toxic metal, as dust (like after exploding) it can get breathed in and stay in the body for decades, and once there exposes the body to radiation. And these effects apply for extremely tiny amounts.

So, reading a fic where Hawkeye has souped up his arrows with plutonium?
And, when Cap asks if that's safe for bystanders, is all 'sure!' ?
*sigh*



No I'm not leaving this as a comment, it's comic book fanfic, the bar is set low.



Also my degree is in English so I might have got bunches wrong.


But stuff like this is just distracting.


Also real science makes much more interesting stories cause they have real constraints you have to work hard to overcome, and possibilities with fascinating implications.

Comments

[philippos42]

That's awful!