As usual, Leon’s crime novels with
Commissario Brunetti are always a pleasure to read. But this time
Leon made a mistake that invalidated the whole plot.
*** WARNING: Spoiler ***
In A Nobel Radiance, somebody
dies when he opens a briefcase containing enough fissile material to
build a nuclear bomb.
Now, bombs are built with either
Plutonium or highly enriched Uranium 235. To build an implosion
bomb, in which a volume of fissile material is highly compressed by
means of conventional explosives, you need between 5 and 15 kg of
fissile material.
As both Uranium and Plutonium are very
dense, it is conceivable to use a briefcase to carry enough fissile
material for a nuclear bomb. It would be a heavy briefcase, not
least because it would be lined with lead.
So far so good, but Leon didn’t
consider that fissile materials generate heat, with a power of the
order of ½ kW / kg. In other words, the, say, 8kg of fissile
material in Leon’s briefcase, would have continuously generated as
much heat as four cloth irons set to maximum.
As lead melts at less than 330°C, I’m
not even sure that, with so much heat being generated by the fissile
material, the radiation-absorbing lining of the briefcase would have
remained solid.
Can you imagine going around with a
20kg briefcase too hot to touch? And then shipping it to Istanbul
claiming that it is a pack of ten thousand plastic syringes?
There are perhaps other issues, like
the partitioning of the material to avoid approaching criticality
(which would significantly increase the generated amount of radiation
and heat) and the fact that the material was in the form of small
blue pellets (while both U and Pu are grey), but the heat is the
critical one (pun intended!)
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