Talk-Polywell.org

http://www.vocativ.com/culture/art-cult ... e=outbrain


He said the half-hollow sphere was the size of a softball and the central sphere was the size of a golfball. “It was heavy uranium, which is heavy metal. One cannot confuse uranium isotopes with lead. Don Miller, in my opinion, did not have a copy of a trigger on the shelf of his display case in his basement relic room—rather he had the real McCoy.”

The discovery shook Gramly. ”To my horror, I see the man has a switch,” he says. “No private person should have this device.”

I know one fusioneer who picked up what he though was a thyratron at an amateur radio hamfest. When he couldn't find data on the part number, he called the manufacturer, who wondered with obvious shock just how he'd come by it. They would not say why they were so concerned, but he's pretty sure the device was ... ahem ... refer to previous post.

Sounds like, at some point, some highly specialized stuff got surplussed or scrapped because it resembled ordinary electronic parts. There could be hundreds of them out there, sitting on shelves of people who shop at hamfests and flea markets.

The guy supposedly has 1/2 a uranium sphere and a central core (the "golfball"), so he is missing the other sphere half.
I can't see any reason why in the 1940s that they would make any of these components of depleted uranium, or even uranium with the normal isotope mix. Is there any reason for doing that? Uranium was in short supply back then and the stuff is hard to work with. I find it hard to believe he has the real deal with enough U-235 for it to be radioactive.

My guess it is just a dummy. Made of some other type of metal, such as what may have been used for demonstrating how the parts should be machined and fitted together. A guide for the machine shops that would create the actual parts. The first fission bomb components cost enormous sums of money to enrich this much material. I can't see how there would have been enough excess to simply lose such parts.

If it was hot, he would have been dead a while ago. Especially if he kept them nested.
I think you are right, it was a mock-up.

And they did not have enough material to be losing track of it like that for sure. They only had enough to make the weapons that were used. One test, two drops. It was a bit of time before they had enough to make more weapons.
But, Hirohito did not know that.

I think they DID make some dummies of depleted uranium. There were a lot of tests done on implosions. Getting the spherical explosions to go of sufficiently symmetrically was a huge technical challenge.

One of our health physics instructors knew the details ... either worked on it or more likely worked for someone involved shortly after the war. I doubt I wrote this down but I remember it. Of course, the uranium bomb was a gun type. They never even tested it ... just dropped it knowing it would work. The spherical bomb used plutonium. IIRC, for that they used depleted uranium dummies, since depleted uranium was otherwise a useless byproduct of the making of bomb-grade uranium, and since testing on actual plutonium was pretty much a bad idea.

I've handled depleted uranium fuel pellets ... not the healthiest thing in the world but you can handle it with modest precautions.

Handling Depleted won't drop you on the spot. But it is not healthy in the long run. The dust is the worst of it.
One of the reasons the navy got rid of all its depleted uranium rounds.

What in the world? These asshats who ratted him out act like they're doing the world a favor?

Sounds like Nazi freaking Germany to me, where your neighbors rat you out to the authorities...